Chapter 3

Sibyl's POV

I lifted my head. I followed the trouser leg up, past the long dark coat, past a shoulder with snow settling on it, to a face I had not seen with my own eyes in a long time.

Grey green eyes. A jaw cut hard and clean. Dark hair, close and neat, with snow in it now, and he did not brush it off.

My body moved before I told it to. I pulled my knees in and went backward across the frozen grass on my hip.

Alaric Thorne. The son Alpha Silas had struck off the family register at sixteen, on the front steps of the very house where the music was still playing. Damian's older brother, on the wrong side of the marriage bed.

He had left the pack at seventeen and come back five years later with a company no one had heard of and a technology no one could copy, and now Argus knew the smell of every wolf in Cedar City before the wolf did.

Argus also made the suppressant. Whoever ran out of their dose on a full moon turned feral in the street and had to be put down by their own pack, and no bloodline on earth could prevent it.

That was the whole of it. He did not need the pack to love him. He only needed the pack to need him. Even the man who called himself Alpha these days walked carefully around his name.

He unfastened his coat instead, one button and then the rest, and drew it off his shoulders. The wool was heavy and grey and worn soft at the collar, and when he stepped forward the air around it was warm. He laid it over me without touching me once, and then he stepped back to exactly the distance he had kept before.

The weight came down on my shoulders and my whole body shuddered. Not the cold. I had been cold all night and the cold had never done that to me. I got my hand out and pulled the coat closed at my throat before I could stop myself, and I thought I heard him breathe out.

"Why are you out here alone?" he said.

His voice was lower than I expected, and he did not raise it. Then he seemed to notice he had asked a stranger a question without telling her who he was. "Oh, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is—"

That was as far as he got. My thumb was already moving on the screen. The flat voice came out of my phone before he could finish the word, and it said, "I know you. Alaric Thorne."

His mouth had opened on the first sound of it. Now it closed. He looked down at the lit screen until it dimmed and went dark, and he did not look annoyed.

There was something at the corner of his eyes instead, small and quick, that came and went before I could name it.

Then he said my name, with nothing in front of it and nothing softening it. "Sibyl. What happened tonight? Why are you crying?"

I typed. I deleted it. I typed again, and deleted that too, and my fingers were shaking so badly from the cold that every letter cost me something. The first version was eleven lines long. The second was six. What I finally sent was two sentences, and it took me a while to get it down that far.

"Damian left me alone by the column. His friends said what they thought of me, and he agreed with them."

He read it twice. I watched his eyes go down the screen and come up again, and his face did not change at all, which frightened me more than shouting would have. The grey green went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the snow.

"I apologize for my brother," he said. "What he did tonight was rude and it was cowardly, and I will speak to him about it when I go back inside."

He did not tell me that Damian had not meant it. He did not tell me that Damian was young, or tired, or that the elders had been at him all evening. He did not say a single word against him either.

He simply took the debt and put it on his own account, and stood there waiting to hear what I would ask for it.

I shook my head. The coat slipped and I caught it and pulled it up again. I typed one handed.

"It is not your fault. You do not have to answer for him."

I sent it before I could think better of it. It was not kindness. People called me kind, and they were wrong. In that house, a favor was only a bill that came due later, and I had spent years paying the ones other people signed for me.

He did not answer at once. He looked down at me for a long moment.

Then he leaned forward. Only half a step. Only half a hand's width. But the cold air between us changed and I caught black pine and cold iron, and the hair on my arms lifted under the wool.

"Since he treats you like that," he said, very quietly, "have you considered ending your engagement to Damian completely?"