Chapter 2

Elowen's POV

The split-jawed beast did not stop screaming.

It had forced the two halves of its jaw between the bars and was working them back and forth. Iron shrieked against iron, and the sound came out of its chest in broken pieces, each one worse than the last.

Rhynn was still on the ground, scrambling backward through the puddle of my wash water. His boots slipped every time he tried to stand.

Then his wolf began to surface.

His knuckles cracked outward, his nails darkened and lengthened, and his eyes turned gold. He grabbed one wrist with the other hand, as if he could physically force his body to stop changing.

Hilde was doing a better job of holding herself together, but only barely. The tendons in her neck stood out beneath her skin, and a faint ridge of fur pushed up along her forearms before she forced it back down.

Neither of them shifted fully. They knew better.

A castle servant did not fight a split-jaw in a stone trench with nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide, and nothing between themselves and its teeth but a bucket.

Rhynn finally got to his feet. Instead of climbing out, he stood in the dirty water, trying to recover some of his pride.

"Look at you."

His voice shook, but he forced the words out anyway.

"Half a jaw. Scorched hide. That ear went into some dog's belly two summers ago, and everyone in the stands laughed at you for it."

He took another step toward the cage.

"You're a broken thing they keep in a hole for the wine crowd. You couldn't hold a real wolf's throat for the length of a breath. Down here eating scraps off a slave's bucket, and you think that makes you something?"

The beast went still.

A low sound rolled out of its chest. It was not a scream. It was deeper, heavier, and I felt it in the roots of my teeth.

The air in the trench seemed to change. The smell of blood and rotting meat faded beneath something cold and patient.

I had spent eleven years down here. I knew the difference between a beast making noise for the crowd and a beast that had decided it was done being mocked.

Rhynn's voice stopped halfway through another.

His wolf understood the danger before his human mind could catch up. The fight drained out of his shoulders, replaced by something much older and more frightened.

Hilde was already climbing.

"Rhynn. The ladder. Now!"

He stumbled toward her. She climbed ahead of him, gripping the iron rungs so tightly that her knuckles turned white. From above, she looked down at me.

"And you."

Her breath was ragged, but she forced each word out slowly.

"You stay right where you are, Motley. Don't climb. Don't call out. Nobody up there is going to come down these stairs for a thing like you."

Her lip curled back from her teeth.

"Stand there and be what you are. Let it open you up. And when they find what's left of you on the straw, I hope it starts at your face."

"Face," Rhynn repeated with a nervous laugh.

They climbed the remaining rungs in a hurry. The trapdoor slammed shut, and the bolt scraped across it.

Then the screaming stopped.

The split-jaw remained near the bars, its head raised. It worked the air slowly before turning its attention back to me.

I put down my scraping blade, wiped my hands on my trousers, and crouched beside the cage. I turned my palm upward and waited.

The beast approached with its head low, then pressed its divided jaw against the iron and breathed over my wrist.

I slipped my fingers through the gap, touching the coarse fur along its brow. It didn't pull away. Instead, it pushed its head forward, asking for more.

My throat tightened.

I rested my hand against its cold iron collar and patted it twice.

"That's enough," I whispered. "Don't trouble yourself comforting me. I stopped being hurt by other people's mockery a long time ago."

I wasn't sure whether I was speaking to the beast or to myself.

It continued breathing against my hand.

When I finally finished cleaning the pit, evening had begun to turn blue beyond the narrow opening high above us. I carried the bucket up the iron rungs, crossed the east corridor, and emptied the dirty water into the drain outside the keep.

I didn't remember my mother's face.

I remembered only a hand once resting against my cheek. The back of it had been warm. I couldn't recall a voice or a scent, and sometimes I wondered whether I had invented the memory because I wanted so badly to believe someone had once touched me gently.

The man and woman who raised me were easier to remember. They used to talk over my head about how much I might fetch in the lower town. When I was small, before the white spread across my left eye and the red mark grew down my cheek, they thought I was pretty enough to sell.

Then my face changed, and their conversations stopped.

I was eight when they sold me to Greystone Keep for half a dark moon copper.

The dog at the gate cost three times that.

Beatrice Vaux, the earl's daughter, was eight years old when I arrived. She had been spoiled from the cradle, and my face was apparently one of the most offensive things she had ever seen. She covered her eyes with both hands and screamed.

That night, I was assigned to the beast-pit.

For eleven years, I had believed my eighteenth birthday might change things. I waited for my wolf to awaken, imagining I might become a normal wolf, with enough strength to defend myself and perhaps earn a place among the others.

At eighteen, my wolf finally woke.

And with her came the truth.

Omega.

All those years of waiting had come to nothing. I had hoped for strength, for a place where I might belong, for something that would make people stop treating me like a thing they could step on.Instead, I had been given another reason for them to look down on me.

Selene made a small, sorrowful sound at the back of my mind and pressed herself against the inside of my ribs.

Easy, I told her silently. I'm still here. We're still here.

She quieted.

I picked up the empty bucket and made my way toward the servants' quarters. The evening air was cold against my damp trousers. I wanted nothing more than to wash the dirt from my hands and sleep.

There was no family waiting for me. No one would ask where I had been if I failed to return. If I disappeared tomorrow, the keep would only have to find someone else to clean the beast-pit.

When I reached my room, I pushed at the door.

It wouldn't open.

I tried again, putting my shoulder against the wood. Something on the other side was blocking it.

Then I smelled it.

The sweet, heavy scent of a wolf in heat drifted through the narrow crack.

A woman's breathy moan followed, then a low, rough growl. The bed creaked in a steady rhythm. Someone laughed softly, and a man's voice murmured something too intimate for me to make out.

I froze with my hand still resting against the door.

Oh, Moon Goddess.

Someone was inside.

And they were very much occupied.

Heat rushed to my cheeks. I should have walked away immediately, but for one mortifying second, I couldn't seem to move.

Then I snatched my hand back as if the wood had burned me.