Chapter 4

Sibyl's POV

I shook my head before I understood the words.

My whole body went into it, and the coat he had laid over my shoulders slid down and hung half off me. I caught the collar with one hand and kept shaking my head with the other, and my breath went in.

Then their voices came back to me, the way they always did. "The engagement is the only thing you still have that is worth anything," Margot had said, flat and patient. "Lose it and you will find out what happens to you."

Conrad had said it too. "Worthless is not the worst thing a person can be, Sibyl. Worthless and free is."

My hands were moving before I told them to. The cold had made my fingers stupid and I hit two wrong letters before I got the line down. I read it once. I did not change it. I turned the screen toward him.

Please do not end it. I want to marry Damian.

Something in my chest curled up small and stayed there while he read.

Alaric did not answer straight away. Snow came down between us and seemed to slow, and then to hang there, and I stood with my hand on his coat and watched his grey green eyes tighten by a fraction. A shutter closing when a hand touches it from the other side.

"You want to marry him," he said.

It was not a question. It was the sound of a man setting something on a scale and writing the weight in a book.

The back of my neck went cold and it had nothing to do with the wind. I lifted my hand and pressed two fingers against my throat, which is what I always did when the silence inside me got too wide.

He watched me do it and did not ask. Then something in his shoulders eased, and his voice came back level and even, the voice he must use in boardrooms, and somehow that was worse than the cold had been.

"Then we should go back inside," he said. "I will have Damian come and apologize to you properly."

He offered his arm the way a man offers a door. I hesitated for a moment, and then I took it.

The hall went quiet in rings as we came in. The first row saw him and stopped talking. Then the second, then the third, until the whole room had turned and the orchestra was playing its waltz to nobody.

I had come into that room earlier in a dress that did not fit and no one had looked at me twice. Now every face swung toward the door, and not one of them was swinging toward me.

The crush came fast. Elders, wives, men with heavy rings and careful smiles, all pressing in to be seen, and I was pushed back the way a leaf is pushed back by a current.

His sleeve slipped out of my hand. I took two steps back and then a third, and when I stopped I was outside the ring again, at the edge of the rug.

He did not come after me. He raised his glass. "Congratulations to the Holloway family on bringing home their real daughter."

Then his tone went cold, and in front of everyone he said it outright. "The moment the real daughter is found, the daughter they raised for twelve years gets thrown behind a pillar."

The music did not stop. People simply stopped talking over it.

Nobody breathed. Every head turned to find me where I stood at the edge of the floor, and I would rather they had gone on not looking. My face went hot to the roots of my hair.

Conrad went white, then red, then a bad patchy white. "Of course we treat them the same," he said, much too loudly. "Both our daughters. Equally. No difference is made in this house."

Margot got there half a second behind him, both hands lifted, her voice soft as cream. "Sibyl is our daughter in every way that matters. She knows it. She has always known it."

Damian pushed through with Cecilia a step behind him, her hand already on his forearm, her face arranged into something soft and worried. "Alaric, there is no need for this. Let us sit down and talk it through quietly."

Alaric did not turn his head. "I have other business," he said.

He set his glass on a passing tray and went, straight through the crowd, which opened for him the way the whole world opened for that man.

And at the doors he stopped for one beat and looked back. His eyes crossed the floor and found me where I stood, and rested on me for one brief second. Then he was gone.

He was not a fool and he was not generous. He ran a company that sold the one thing every wolf in this city needed on a full moon.

A man like that does not spend his credit on a girl with no voice and no wolf. So why say my name in a room full of people who could not be bothered to learn it.

Then I saw Damian coming. He was working his way around the edge of the crowd toward me with his jaw set and his mouth already open, and I could see the shape of the first word before it arrived.

I did not want to hear it. Not the apology, not the excuse, not the story about his friends and the wine.

I turned around and walked, up the stairs and back to my room, and shut the door behind me.