Chapter 2

Sibyl's POV

I did not go back to the column. His keys were still in my hand, so I turned my shoulder to the middle of the ballroom and walked along the wall until the chandelier light thinned and the music came from behind me.

No one stopped me. That was the only kindness the room had left.

Behind the staircase was an alcove the servants used in the daytime. A bench, a mirror, two hooks, and a door standing half open on a coat room dark with wool.

I put my back to the plaster and pressed two fingers to the base of my throat and made my breathing slow and shallow.

It was a thing I learned before I learned to read. In the room behind the greenhouse, where the wolfsbane grew in long rows and the air tasted of iron, the wrong kind of breathing cost me a night. So I made myself small and let the silence cover me.

Two women came to the mirror with their glasses still full. The taller one did not lower her voice.

"So that is the one. Twelve years of charity, and this is what it bought."

"What is the mute for now?" the other said. "She has no wolf. She cannot even howl at a full moon."

"Nothing. She is worth nothing. Look at the dress."

They fixed their hair and left. I did not raise my head. I counted my breaths, and it did not help, because they had not said one word the whole room was not already thinking.

Behind the alcove a narrower door opened into the side parlor where the Alpha heirs took their drinks away from the elders. It stood open the width of a hand, and I heard Damian laugh.

Damian Thorne was the Alpha's son and the heir to the pack. Silas Thorne ruled, and every word out of his son's mouth weighed more than anything a Holloway could say.

The Holloways were Betas. Conrad and Margot had raised me in a Beta house, taught me Beta manners, and none of it had ever made me one.

"At least she is pretty," one of them said. "Those eyes could make a man forget a great deal."

"Pretty is not a bloodline. She is a half blood with no wolf and no voice. You cannot bring that to a table and expect men to keep their faces."

"She does not even seem like a Beta," the first one said, laughing. "There is nothing in her at all."

"Cecilia is what a Beta is supposed to be. Standing with the elders tonight, speaking when she is spoken to. That is breeding. Keep the mute in the dark if you want her. To marry, you take someone like Cecilia."

"Proper," another one repeated.

I should have gone then. If I had gone I could have kept the last of it, the small hope I had been carrying all evening like a coin I was afraid to spend. But I stopped, and my thumb went still on the fob, and I waited to hear him say no.

There was a pause. Then a sigh, and a glass set down on wood.

"Honestly," Damian said, "the way she is now, she does not fit me."

Under my ribs something small and cold closed, the way a door closes in a house where everyone is asleep.

I put the keys in my left hand and walked out of the shadow.

The light fell across my face and the men at the table looked up. I saw the instant Damian saw me. His face went grey, then white, and what came into his eyes was not shame. It was the flat panic of a man caught with his hand in a drawer.

I did not speak. I could not. So I stood in the doorway and let him look at my eyes until he could not stand it.

"Excuse me," he said, and his voice broke in the middle.

He came around the table and caught my wrist. "Sibyl. I only said it to shut them up. You have heard how they talk. That was my mouth, not my heart."

I looked at his fingers turning my skin white. My stomach turned over once, slowly, like something waking.

"Say something," he said. "Type something."

He had asked me to type something. It was not the worst thing he had said tonight, but it was the thing that decided it for me.

I pulled my arm. He held. I pulled again with my whole body behind it, and my wrist came loose, and he was left with his hand open and empty in the air.

I looked at him once more. Then I did not look at him again.

I went through the terrace doors and down the steps, and the cold hit my face like water. I gathered the dress in both fists and ran along the side of the house, past the lamps, into the part of the garden no one tended.

The path went from gravel to frozen grass to nothing, and an old fountain stood dry on the lawn.

My ankle turned on a stone I did not see. I went down on my knees and then onto my side.

I pulled my knees to my chest and put my arms around them and cried. There was no sound in it.

My shoulders shook and my throat worked and the air came out of me in pieces, and nothing reached the trees. I pressed my fingers to my throat and let it go on.

Then the grass in front of my hands went dark.

A long thin shadow lay across my clasped arms and did not move.