Chapter 2

That was the first night. What came after nearly killed me.

I was nineteen. I knew I needed treatment, but I was terrified that using his card would prove him right.

One of Lucian's friends offered to lend me the money instead.

"Come have a few drinks with us," he said. "Stay the night — the money's yours."

I went to the club. Every time I tried to put my glass down, someone filled it again.

I kept looking at the man who had promised to help, waiting for him to say I had done enough.

By the time Lucian arrived, I could taste copper.

He pulled me out of the booth. No one tried to stop him.

During the drive home, I sat with one hand pressed to my stomach. He didn't speak until he parked.

"Do you have any idea what they were going to do to you?"

I couldn't look at him.

"Is money worth that much to you? You'd let them kill you just to pay me back?"

My stomach burned.

I wanted to explain that I hadn't gone there to punish him, that I was trying to get treatment without taking anything from him. But I had already heard what he thought of that explanation.

He helped me inside, still furious. Then he saw the blood at the corner of my mouth.

He knelt in front of me and wiped it away.

"Don't move. I'm calling a healer."

For a little while, I let myself hope.

He stayed while the healer treated my bleeding stomach and calmed my wolf. When we were alone, he pulled the blanket over my knees.

"That three hundred thousand—" He stopped. "What did you—"

His phone rang.

Camille was crying loudly enough for me to hear her. Her wolf was out of control, she said. She needed him. No one else could help.

Lucian looked at me for a long moment.

I waited. But he tucked the blanket around me and left.

After that, his friends called me a gold-digger to my face. Lucian stopped laughing when they did it. He never told them to stop.

Soon afterward, my mother was diagnosed with wolf-sickness. The disease moved so quickly that I barely had time to learn its name before the healers were telling me to prepare myself.

On the day she died, I called Lucian from beside her bed.

"Mom—Lucian, please—"

"I'm in a council meeting."

He hung up.

I sent voice notes. In the first, I tried to explain. In the next, I could hardly speak. I kept recording them anyway, as though one might finally make him come.

Much later, a transfer appeared in our chat.

$888.

I stared at it with my mother's hand still in mine.

I learned what that number meant. Whenever I tried to tell Lucian what I was going through, money appeared in place of an answer. Sometimes there wasn't even that.

We remained mates. He never petitioned the elders to break our bond, and I never understood why he wanted to keep someone he despised.

By the time I came home from my final treatment, the house was cold and empty.

It was early evening. I set my papers on the table, measured out the prescribed herbs, and took the sleeping tablets the way the healer had told me to.

The pain had spread through my whole body by then; even holding the cup steady took both hands.

Above me hung the photograph from our mating ceremony.

Lucian was smiling in it. He had been twenty, only a year older than me, and so sure we would be happy that I had believed it too.

Just before the photograph was taken, he had cupped my face and kissed me.

"I'll take care of you for the rest of my life, Nora."

I picked up my phone and texted: [Lucian, if I died, would you grieve for me?]

The reply came almost at once.

$888.

For a moment, I couldn't make my fingers move. Then I typed again.

[The healer says my wolf-sickness is terminal. I have seven days at most. I'm not asking you for money.]

I sent it and left the transfer unclaimed.

There was no answer to that message.

Nausea forced me into the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, retching until my eyes watered, but nothing came up.

When I could stand again, I made my way back to bed.

The medicine was taking effect. Beneath the pain, I felt myself slipping toward sleep.

In the haze, I saw Lucian as he had been at twenty, grinning as he tucked a flower behind my ear.

"So," he said. "What do you think about becoming my mate?"

I tried to reach for him.

I wanted to say yes again. I wanted one more minute with the man who had asked me that question, before he learned to look at me with disgust.

My hand fell onto the empty sheet.

I had followed every prescription and gone to every treatment. Tonight, I had nothing left to do but close my eyes.