Chapter 3

Sera

I got down onto the road. My knees were still shaking. "You crossed the line."

She blinked at me, once, and then her whole face rearranged itself into recognition, which was worse than the sneer. "Oh," she said. "Oh, I know you. You're the Voss girl. You're that one." She looked me up and down, from the ink stain on my cuff to the flour on my knees, and something bright and mean came up in her eyes. "The one who never shifted. The pack's little project. I've heard about you."

She opened her little bag, took out a fold of bills, and dropped them on the road between us as if she were feeding a bird. "There. That's the bumper, the panel, and something extra for your trouble. Buy yourself a decent dinner." Her eyes flicked to my middle. "Or don't. Doesn't seem to be your problem."

I looked at the money on the asphalt. I did not look at her. "You were doing twice the limit and you changed lanes into me. There are four men on the loading dock across the street. They all saw it."

That got her attention. She went very still, and then she smiled, and it was not a nice smile at all. She was not a fool, this one. That was the trouble with her.

Behind me, the loading dock had emptied.

"She's right, miss," said the feed-shop man, coming out into the road with his apron still on and his hands up like he was calming a horse. "I saw the whole thing from the door. You came across the line. We all saw it."

I believe Sera. She's always driven steady," the bread woman said, stepping up on the other side of me, and I felt her hand land briefly on my arm. "You can't go slandering her like this."

I stood there with the two of them in front of me and my back against the truck, and I could not make my mouth work. Nobody had ever done that for me. I'd only been here less than a year, and yet they were already on my side.

The woman in the white fur looked at them — at the aprons and the flour and the grey work clothes — and her face went ugly with something that was not quite rage. "You," she said. "A pack of bottom-feeders, standing up for a defective—"

"Ma'am." The feed-shop man said it quietly and did not move.

And that was when she played the card she had been holding the whole time.

She straightened, and lifted her chin, and her voice changed into something silkier and colder. "Do you know who I am? Lyra Solenne. Of Hollow Moon." She paused long enough for every one of them to hear it, and then she said, with a little smile and a slow sideways look at me that was meant entirely for me, "I'm Caden's closest person. So before anyone here decides who to stand next to, they should think very carefully about who they are standing in front of."

The name went through the street like a cold draft under a door.

Caden Ashveil. The Alpha of Eclipse Pack. There is not one wolf in this territory who says that name the way they say other names; they say it lower, and they say it carefully, and then they look around. I had seen him exactly twice in five years, both times through a window across a courtyard, and both times my whole body had understood before my head did that the safest thing I could possibly do was be somewhere else. He is the closest thing to a law this place has, and he has never once, in all the time I have lived on his land, had a single reason to know that I exist.

Oh, I thought. Oh. She's with him.

I did not move. But something inside me took one step back, the way a body steps back from a ledge, and my hands, hanging at my sides, curled in on themselves so hard that my nails bit my palms. The crowd had gone quiet. Of course it had. They were good people, and they had families, and every one of them was doing the arithmetic I was doing: a defective on one side, and the Alpha's woman on the other.

"Go on home," I said, quietly, to the bread woman, to the old man, to the dock. "It's all right. Thank you. Truly." And then I turned back to her.

I did not look at the money on the road. I did not pick it up. I did not bow my head, either, which is the thing I think she wanted most and the only thing I had left that was worth anything. "You hit my truck," I said, "because you crossed the line. That's all that happened here. Take your money back and go."

The pretty face went flat and hard. She looked at me for seconds, and I watched something settle into her eyes — not anger, exactly. Anger burns out. This was the other thing. Slow, and patient, and cold, the way a stone is cold at the bottom of a well.

"We'll meet again," she said.

She got back in the black car and it pulled away hard enough to rock my truck on its springs. Her car turned north when it went, toward the boundary road — toward the main estate, where the high walls start. She had been coming here anyway. She had come all this way to see him, and she had stopped to look at me in the road, and that, somehow, was the part that made my skin crawl.

I stood there until the taillights were gone. Then I crouched down and picked up the money and left it on the loading dock for the feed man to spend on his kids, because I was not going to carry it home. When I straightened up, the pull came again — low, deep, heavy, that same slow fist closing under my navel and holding, and this time it did not let go for almost a minute. My hand went to my belly. My hand went behind me, to the small of my back.

The crescent was hot.

I got in the truck and sat with both hands on the wheel and looked out at the flat empty road, and for the first time that whole endless day, I was afraid of something I could not name and could not argue with, and I put the truck in gear and drove to the Rooks.