جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

LENAAstra did not let me take off my shoes."You found out," she said immediately, cards fanned out on her bed, as though she had been waiting for me to appear at any second. "I can smell it on you. New wolf energy. Confusion, mostly. A touch of anger.""You could smell it." I sighed, already past being surprised at how easy it was for her to read me. "Of course you could. What are you?""Pack liaison," she responded airily, straightening the cards in front of her, giving herself a pause before continuing. "Correll pack, sent us to check up on you when we found out the scholarship application bearing your surname turned up at the university on the Silverclaw territory. Trust me, this is not a coincidence, Lena. Someone had managed to intervene with your adoption proceedings, to ensure that you would be within the Corvin lands at least until you graduated. Perhaps they also took care of your foster care arrangements before that." She paused, giving me an assessing look. I was still on

LENADamien chose the location, which, in hindsight, should have said it all. Not the training facility this time, but a restaurant in the city - an upscale establishment with cloth napkins and a maître d' who eyed my thrifted coat like it was a personal affront to the establishment. Public, civilised grounds - the kind where a boy like Damien would choose to make his stand, all pretence of deniability stripped away, with nobody to accuse him of anything either.if he chose poorly.Cole was waiting inside the restaurant with Noah, using the cover of the menu to hide his jaw-clenching scrutiny of the area. He'd wanted to be closer. I'd practically begged him to stay at the facility, telling him it was safer, but it was mine to lose, and he knew it. Now he was seeing exactly what I was forced to. Damien stood when I reached the table, all polished courtesy and expensive cologne, guiding me to a chair with the air of a man who thought the evening was already under his control. "You came,

LENAI read the article four times on the walk back to campus, the first two times shaking all over so badly I couldn't make sense of it anyway.It was old, an old piece of paper with text that had been scanned in from the original handwritten, judging by the words, and using heavily archaic terms like "hereby," "aforementioned," and "territorial boundary as established." There was a signature in the second paragraph, a name I couldn't place, and a line somewhere toward the fourth about water rights in years of drought that twisted in my gut like a knife if what he said about Damien's family was true, and it wasn't that hard for me to believe him this time.I couldn't quite place the feeling of impotence as I stared at this thing, this proof of sorts, in my hands. It would have been much easier if they hadn't been telling the truth, if my family had died for no reason at all, as another tragic family loss to be mourned. Instead I had this treaty, this drought that supposedly caused it

LENACole shows up to my dorm the following afternoon, all messed up from his practice game, which is not exactly a surprise since he looks like he hasn't gotten much sleep that week. He's still in his practice gear when he arrives, his hair damp from the shower he probably took right after the rink, which makes me realize just how much he must have wanted to talk and why he was in such a hurry."We need to talk," he tells me when I don't immediately invite him in, standing in the hallway, unsure of his welcome, which is completely understandable given the circumstances."So talk."I don't move, and he looks over my shoulder to where Astra is and knows she's at class, and I'm being petty, if I'm being completely honest, but I'm not ready to let him in."I'm in a hallway.""You said something like that last time, too." Cole sighed as he ran a hand over the back of his neck, looking down the hallway as if he was expecting someone to pop out and listen in. "Can we at least have a convers

LENAThe dream came again that night, sharper than ever before, the forest, the chase, and the eyes watching from the darkness, and this time was no different from the hundred other times before, except that each shadow seemed three times clearer, the smell of pine and moss more palpable than I ever remembered, so real that I woke up shaking, convinced that I smelt the damp earth still clinging to my skin. But this time I did not wake up screaming, because somehow, I was still half-asleep even when I opened my eyes. My hands were clawed something inhuman and curved, but only for the briefest moment before they snapped back to normal.I stumbled to the bathroom, flipped the switch, and nearly screamed at the pale reflection staring back at me, eyes the same shape as always except that at the very edges the brown had bled into gold. As I blinked furiously to convince myself it was not there, the strange coloration vanished as if it had only been a trick of the light. My hands were still