Chapter 4

Cassian was seven years younger than me.

He'd just turned nineteen when we met.

It was pouring that morning when I went to open the Hollow Moon. A boy sat huddled on the curb outside my door, a duffel bag clutched to his chest, his hair and clothes soaked through.

He looked like a stray pup nobody wanted. And he smelled like one, too: that faint, bitter tang of a wolf with no pack.

I brought him inside.

He told me he went to Cascade University, right here in town. Over the summer, he'd gone home to his old pack and gotten into a screaming fight with his parents, and they'd banished him. Now the dorms were closed for break, and he had nowhere to go.

The Hollow Moon was tiny back then, just a handful of tables, though it was already the Silverfang pack's gathering place and neutral ground.

He begged to stay and help out for no pay.

"Please, Alpha Silverfang. I don't need wages. Just don't send me away."

He looked up at me so pitifully, his voice so low and cracked, that I caved.

I paid him a regular wage. I cleared out a spare room in my house and made it his staff quarters.

That was where it happened. Where he and I first crossed the line.

"I'll take responsibility for this, Tills," he said, those starry eyes locked on mine. "I promise."

It was the first time he'd called me anything other than Alpha.

And he kept his word. When he was twenty-two and I was twenty-nine, we held the bonding ceremony and chose each other.

The first few years of our marriage, we were inseparable. But slowly, something started to change. I could feel it.

It wasn't as if I wouldn't have let him go if he'd asked. But cheating inside a bond is different. Once you do it, there's no happy ending.

He'd decided I'd gone dull.

What I wanted to tell him was this: seven more years had bought me money, time, and the nerve to play, and to lose.

Marlowe copied the dashcam data onto a drive.

"Tills, I've got you," she said. "I'll draft the Severance Pact myself. And everything he sent her came out of what you two built together. We're getting every cent back. Those two scumbags are not walking away from this."

I smiled, small and cool. "Of course. Every cent that's mine, I'm taking back."

I'd thought I'd be shattered. But now that it had come to this, I felt oddly steady.

While I was hurting, Valerie posted three days of vlogs on Howl, one after another.

In the videos, she wore a short skirt and struck pose after pose for the camera. The one holding the phone and snapping the pictures was Cassian.

I thought of all the trips we'd taken together. Every time, I'd asked him to take my picture, and every time, he'd had an excuse. On the rare occasions he gave in, the shots were awful. He turned a 5'5" woman into a 4'9" one. He turned 99 pounds into 143. Or he shot me so dark you couldn't make out my face. I had a whole folder of rejects.

He always said he didn't know how to take photos, didn't want to learn, and that I should just take what I got.

But the pictures he took of Valerie? Every frame was carefully composed.

It wasn't that he couldn't. He just didn't want to take mine.

Over those few days, he took her river swimming, shooting the rapids, fishing. He took her up a ridge to watch the moon rise, and then he kissed her beside a lake.

Everything he'd once done with me, he was now doing all over again with her.

A few months ago, I'd told him I wanted to go back to Moonwood Wilds and run there with him once more.

"Sure," he'd said. "As soon as I'm done with this project, I'll take you."

Now he was done with the project.

But he'd taken someone else.

"He's due back in a week," I told Marlowe. "When he lands, I want that Severance Pact in my hands."

She looked at me, her eyes full of ache. "Don't worry. I'll make sure it's done."

Then she lowered her voice.

"And Tills? Whatever you do, don't tell Gideon."