All Chapters of Poison: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Hadley I woke at nine with one arm hanging off the side of the bed and the mug still sitting on my nightstand. For a while I didn’t move. The headache had settled in behind my right eye and made itself comfortable, and the light coming through the curtains seemed personally offended that I was still alive, and there was a sour ring dried into the bottom of the mug where the last of the tea had sat. I’d made a promise at some point in the night that I was never drinking again. I’d made it once before, after Maddox convinced me that mixing three different kinds of alcohol was fine because they were all technically clear. I hadn’t listened to myself then either. This time I meant it. I sat up slowly and reached for the mug so I could take it down with me. The note was under it. Folded once, in Avery’s handwriting, her ridiculous looping A at the bottom of it. Drink this. All of it. And stop thinking before you hurt yourself. Love you, idiot. — A I read it twice. Then I sat on t

HadleyBy Monday morning I’d upgraded from hurt to angry.Much more useful.Hurt had kept me awake most of Sunday night replaying things in fragments I couldn’t do anything with. His face. The way he’d looked at me before he said it, like he’d finally worked out what I was.Whore.Angry got me out of bed.I shoved my hair up into a ponytail, pulled open the drawer where I kept my training gear, and reached for the lavender set I’d worn a hundred times.My hand stopped.It stopped on its own, before I’d thought anything at all, and I stood there with my fingers an inch off the fabric and understood what was happening to me.The sports bra and shorts were nothing. They were comfortable, they’d been washed so many times the waistband had gone pale, and I had trained in them in front of half this pack since I was sixteen without one single th

Hadley By the end of the second week I had become very good at telling myself things were fine. It wasn’t difficult. Nothing was wrong. Not in any way I could put a finger on and hold there. Avery’s wrist healed. The healer cleared her four days after she hurt it, though Killian spent another three treating her like she’d come apart if anyone breathed near her. The tea thing hadn’t happened again. Mostly. Killian was still being a dick, but I’d stopped expecting that to fix itself overnight — whatever the bond had done to his head clearly needed time. Jaxson was quieter around me, but Jaxson had always been quieter than Maddox, which is not a demanding standard. Aunt Elara still came into my room without knocking when she wanted my opinion on a curtain. Uncle Alaric still called me Haddie. Maddox still stole everything that wasn’t physically attached to my body. Normal. Different, maybe. Normal enough. —- Three days a w

HadleyBy Tuesday the broken vase had become funny again. Mostly.Maddox had started calling it the Bellamy’s Massacre, which was dramatic even for him, and Avery had threatened to buy him the matching bowl purely so she could break it over his head. Aunt Elara had asked how much the thing cost, stared at me when I told her, and then gone very quiet in the way people do when they’re trying not to say something rude about somebody else’s taste.Nobody mentioned who knocked it over again.Neither did I.—-I got to training early enough that morning to claim one of the benches by the windows. I’d changed before coming down, so all I had to do was shove my hoodie into my bag and get my hair out of the way. The charcoal had finally come out after two shampoos, though there was still blue paint under one thumbnail that apparently intended to stay there until I died.Avery wasn’t there yet. Killian and Jaxson were across the room with three of the senior warriors. No Maddox, which meant he

Killian By the time I left her room the vial was sealed in an evidence bag, the tin had gone with it, and the raven drawings were under my arm. Mum went downstairs with Jaxson when he took Hadley. She hadn’t said another word to me after I gave the order, which should have been a relief. It wasn’t. It came with me into the corridor and sat across the back of my shoulders. One of the warriors stayed behind to finish documenting the room. I stopped at the door and looked back once. It looked the way it has always looked. Her boots kicked under the end of the bed instead of beside it. A scarf hanging half off a chair. Paint on the desk that has been there since she was fifteen. Charcoal fingerprints along the edge of a sketchbook. A ceramic mug full of brushes that hasn’t been washed properly in a week. Nothing in that room looks calculated. Nothing in it looks lik