Chapter4

Kael went very still.

"Enough! Leave that garbage alone!" He pressed a hand to his forehead, furious. "It's a box. A stupid wooden box! If you want one that badly, I'll get you a new one! Vivienne didn't do it on purpose!"

My hands stopped moving.

I rose slowly, stepped back, and spoke to him the way any pack wolf would. Polite. Distant. "That won't be necessary, Alpha Kael."

Something flickered across his face.

In fifteen years, I had never called him anything but "Kae." Not in private, not in front of the whole pack. He had lectured me again and again about rank and respect, told me to say "Alpha" like everyone else, and every time I had refused. "Alpha" was what you called a wolf who was a stranger to you, I'd told him.

Yet here, with no audience but Vivienne, I had called him "Alpha Kael."

A prickle of unease ran across his skin.

Vivienne felt his attention slipping and tugged at his arm, her voice turning soft and sugary.

"Is Lyra still upset with me? It's all because I'm so weak. I should never have touched her things…"

Kael blinked and came back to himself. He rubbed her back absently.

"Just watch where you're going next time. Lyra's always been sentimental about that box. She's still a kid. Don't take it to heart."

It was the first time he hadn't backed Vivienne all the way. He had even, in his own clumsy way, spoken up for me. Jealousy flashed hot in Vivienne's eyes, but she lowered her head obediently. "You're right. I understand."

That night, I collected every letter from the floor and fed them all to the fireplace.

Fifteen years of loving him curled at the edges, went black, and crumbled into ash.

Writing them had taken fifteen years. Burning them took barely a minute.

Footsteps came up behind me, and then his voice.

"Lyra. What are you doing?"

I kept my eyes on the flames and tossed in another handful. "Nothing much. Taking out the trash."

He saw the stack of letters still waiting their turn, and his expression darkened.

"Once the extraction is over, Vivienne and I will hold our marking ceremony. Officially."

A small shiver ran through me. Then the numbness closed back over it.

"Congratulations."

I said it like I was commenting on the weather. No anger. No jealousy. Nothing at all. He studied my face for a long moment, hunting for a crack, a flinch, anything. There wasn't one.

He couldn't have said why, but it left him feeling oddly cheated. So he pushed harder, as if he could pry a reaction out of me by force.

"Vivienne says a marking ceremony only happens once in a wolf's life, and she won't wear anything stitched by some ordinary tailor. It has to be the best seamstress in the pack."

His gaze pinned me in place.

"You've been sewing my coats and shirts since you were a pup, Lyra. Everyone knows nobody in Duskfall sews better. So you'll make the ceremony clothes. Hers and mine. Yourself."

That finally got through. I stared at him, unable to believe what I'd heard.

He looked almost satisfied to see it. "What? Don't want to? Have you forgotten you owe Vivienne? You've made her miserable. This is how you make amends."

I lowered my lashes so he wouldn't see the bitter mockery in my eyes.

As if I'd ever been allowed to say no.

I drew in a long breath and offered him a thin smile.

"As you command, Alpha Kael. An order is an order."

Whether those clothes would ever actually be finished was another matter.

I walked past him without looking up and stumbled out of the room.

Kael stayed where he was, alone with the dying fire, and the uneasy tightness in his chest only got worse.

Wasn't this exactly what he'd always wanted? She had stopped arguing. She obeyed. She'd stopped chasing him. So why did it feel like something was wrong?

I spent the next day alone outside the pack. When I came back, something had changed.

Wolves I passed stared at me with open contempt. A few of the younger pups spat at my feet and then ran off laughing.

"Always walking around like she's better than us, and the whole time she's been selling us to the Rogues!"

"My cousin pulled border duty last month. The Rogues were waiting exactly where he'd be. He barely made it back alive!"

"Traitors don't belong here. Throw her out!"

The insults kept coming, and I couldn't make sense of any of it. Then my phone rang. Nora.

She sounded furious and frantic at the same time.

"Lyra! Someone's framing you! Get on the wolf forum, right now! It's all anyone's talking about!"

I pulled up the forum with shaking hands.

Pinned to the very top of the front page, outlined in glaring red, was a post full of photographs of letters.

The handwriting looked almost exactly like mine. So did the signature. Every letter was addressed to Brask, the Rogue leader whose band had been hitting our eastern border for a year, and in them "I" had spelled out Duskfall's patrol routes and guard rotations, night after night. According to the post, the originals still carried my scent, and three separate trackers had confirmed it.