Chapter 5

Sibyl's POV

The next morning, I came down at seven and heard them before I saw them.

Three chairs at the long table were already filled. Conrad sat with his paper folded shut beside his plate. Margot sat with her back straight. Cecilia sat between them with her eyes swollen and her hands wrapped around a napkin she was not using.

I knew this room. I had walked into it a hundred times and counted them first. How many of them. How calm. How still.

Cecilia spoke first, and she let her voice crack in the middle of it.

"I keep thinking I should not have come back."Her eyes were red. "Sibyl left in the middle of the toast. Every guest saw it. I lay awake all night."

Margot's hand moved at once, smoothing a curl back from Cecilia's temple. "You will not say that in this house."

Conrad set his knife down and laid both hands flat and lowered his voice until it sat on the table between us.

"Last night, who gave you permission to leave."

My hand was in my pocket before the rest of me caught up. I typed with my thumb, brought the phone up, and the voice came out flat and clean and too loud in a room that had stopped breathing.

"I am very glad Cecilia is home. I only went up because I was not feeling well."

Cecilia bit the inside of her lip. Margot fixed her hair again. Conrad did not move.

"Not feeling well," he said. "Or an excuse."

Margot turned her cup a quarter turn. "Last night Alaric said things about this house he had no way of knowing. While you were out, did you speak to anyone?"

I shook my head.

"Did you."

I shook my head again, and then again, because my head was the only thing in that house that worked without a screen or a price. My thumb was not steady. It took me three tries to get the line right.

"After dinner, do I still have to go to the room with the wolfsbane."

The room went quiet in a different way. Margot left her hand resting on the cup handle.

"Cecilia is home," she said. "The calling is finished. That room is closed to you from today."

Cecilia glanced up at me once, quickly, and there was nothing in the look that wanted anything good for me. Then she went back to her plate. We ate, and the forks knocked against the plates, and nobody said another word.

Five days passed and nothing happened in any of them. I did not write to Damian once.

On the fifth evening he came. He stood in the hall with his coat still on and did not apologize. He said he wanted to tell me something instead.

"When I was a boy," he said, "I used to walk the back of this house. Along the wall where the vents come out low to the ground. You were on the other side of one of those grates. I used to sit outside it and talk to you through the metal, and leave things in the gap at the bottom. A tin box of sweets. A small jar of ointment that smelled of pine and something cold."

My hands closed on my knees. Hearing him say that, my heart softened.

I had kept that tin for years. That voice had been the one warm thing in my life, the only proof that someone outside the wolfsbane room still remembered I was there.

"It's a bad way the family's in now. My father makes his own decisions, and they aren't mine to make. I can't hold my position alone." He looked at me then. "The Thornes are holding a pack banquet. I want you there with me as my companion."

He was quiet for a moment then. When he spoke again his voice had dropped.

"I need you."

Something in my chest that had been clenched for five days came loose all at once. I picked up the phone and deleted my first answer. I deleted the second one too.

"All right."

On the day of it he came for me himself. Cecilia was already at the car with her coat folded over her arm and her hair done very carefully. Damian held the door and smiled at me across the roof. "She has only just come home and she knows no one. It will do her good to meet people."

I reached the car and Cecilia put two fingers to her temple and said she got sick in the back, and that she was so sorry, and that Sibyl would not mind, would she.

So I sat in the back.

They talked the whole way. She laughed in the right places and asked the right questions, and he turned his head to answer her.

Twice he remembered me and asked whether I was warm, and both times she said something else first, and both times he laughed.

I pressed my phone screen bright and let it go dark. Then I turned my face to the window.

The hall was full of pure bloods in heavy coats, standing in groups that opened for Damian and closed behind him.

One of them looked at me and lifted his voice so the men behind him would turn. "A wolf with no wolf. Can she even stand here without falling over?" Another one laughed into his glass. "Say something, sweetheart. No? Right. She cannot."

The woman took Cecilia by the arm and turned her around.

"Now that is a proper fiancée," she said. "The two of you standing together look like something out of a painting."

Cecilia lowered her eyes. "You should not say that in front of my sister."

Damian's face changed. He stepped forward, and I waited.

"Enough," Damian said.

It came out light. It came out the way a man tells a room to keep its voice down, not the way a man tells a room he will break the hand that touches what is his.

Cecilia put her hand on his sleeve. "I don't know a single person here, Damian. Take me round to meet the elders, would you? I'll be lost on my own." she said, her voice small and pleasant.

"Of course," he said.

He put his hand on her back, easy and natural, and the two of them turned away together.