Chapter 2
Cael let go of my wrist and turned to the Pack enforcer in the doorway. "Holding cell."
The enforcer didn't ask which one. There was only the kind they used for Pack members under review.
The silver-walled cell was the size of a coat closet. The door closed and the air went thin. Silver hums against the wolf in you, even a sick wolf, and the four walls hummed close enough together that my pulse felt drowned in it.
I had been in one of these once before.
Seven years ago, after the raid, they'd put me in one of these with another suspect. They'd forgotten to check on us. Three days later, when the door opened, the other wolf had been dead long enough that the silver had begun to taint the smell of him.
That was the year I lost the ability to be in small rooms.
I clawed at the silver-coated walls until my nail beds split and didn't stop. I screamed for some part of it, though my throat had gone hoarse before anyone came.
When the door opened, I crawled out across the floor. I reached for Cael's leg because it was the closest thing to ground.
He stepped back, and my hand closed on nothing.
"Stand up, Seren."
"Please—"
"Stand up. We don't have time for this."
I got to my knees. The world tilted. I stayed on my knees.
"Every job you've done these six years," he said, looking down at me, "I approved. Every silver-handling assignment, every cleanup, every blood-trial. I thought you'd be uncomfortable. I thought you'd come out the other side a wolf I could be proud of."
He said it as though he were explaining something kind.
Six years of memory came up at once. The silver fragments I'd scrubbed out of den floors with my bare hands. The afternoon a group of younger Betas had decided to test the traitor's discipline by holding me down. He'd approved that?
"Tonight is the Hunt and Feast," he said. "You will be there. You will stand next to Vesper. You will tell the Pack that everything between you and her these last seven years has been a misunderstanding."
Behind him, Aldric stepped into view. He looked, almost, generous.
"Do this, Seren, and I'll arrange a formal Bond ceremony. Public. Full Pack witness. You always wanted one."
My hand drifted to the side of my neck.
The bite mark there had been Aldric's. It had been there for eight years. It had been fading for the last three, and I had told myself it was the silver wearing me down.
I didn't say anything.
I pushed the hatred back down. I raised my head. There was nothing on my face.
"All right. I'll go."
The Hunt grounds were lit by twin bonfires by the time we arrived. Spit-roasted carcasses on the iron racks. The Pack ringed the clearing in ceremonial silver cuffs. A scribe stepped out of the crowd with a recording-stone held up at face height.
"Seren Ashby. You haven't appeared at a Pack event in six years. Would you tell us, finally, the truth between you and the orphan your family adopted?"
My mother Lena pressed a folded paper into my hand. Read it, she breathed.
I unfolded it. I wandered into Rogue territory as a child. Vesper's adopted parents—my parents—generously brought us both home. After I returned to the Pack, I grew jealous of Vesper's standing and began spreading lies. The Rogue raid seven years ago was the result of those lies. All of it was my fault.
I tore the paper in half. Then in half again.
"Why," I said, loud enough for the recording-stone, "would I lie to clear a wolf who personally led Rogues across our border?"
The clearing went still.
Vesper's eyes filled. She walked into the firelight, slowly, and pulled the collar of her dress down off her shoulder, turning her neck so the whole Pack could see.
A fresh Mate Bond mark. Aldric's. Whole and unfaded.
"Aldric and I have been Bonded for three years," she said gently. "Where's your mark, Seren?"
My fingers went, on their own, to the bite at the side of my neck.
It was a thin shadow under the skin now. Almost gone.
—persistent unilateral Bond dissolution—
The diagnosis line lit up behind my eyes. The Pack physician had circled it. I had not understood what it meant.
A Beta's organs do not survive having a Bond torn out of her one slow inch at a time.
My six years of dying had not been the silver. They had not been the labor.
They had been him.
"Names don't matter, Seren," Aldric was saying, gently. "You took Vesper's place in this Pack. We're only correcting that."
Cael's voice carried across the clearing. "My sister's mental state has been unstable for years. The Pack shouldn't take her words tonight literally. There is paranoia involved."
A small body shot through the crowd and hit me at the waist. I went down on the dirt.
I knew her before she'd finished standing back up. I had carried her for nine months. I knew her face.
"What are you doing here, traitor?" Lyra hissed.
Cael bent down and put his phone screen against my ear.
In the video, three Rogues were dragging me into the trees off the back road behind the Pack clinic. I'd been twenty-six. Coming home from a night shift.
"If a child saw this," he murmured, "she might think her real mother was a Rogue's whore."
"That isn't a fake video," I said. My voice cracked. "That actually happened—"
"Stop performing." His voice cooled. "Those Rogues were actors I hired. No real Rogue would touch a Beta inside Pack territory."
I tried to stand. The world tilted again.
Behind me, someone took a fistful of my hair and pulled—
