The Way My Sweet Sister Kept Me Warm

Two weeks after Coldwater let me out, my family asked me to go back behind silver.

Silas Thorne—my mate—stood across the living room with his arms folded. Nothing in his face resembled the man who once promised nothing would ever touch me.

"Rosie lost her temper at the Redmere dinner," he said, flat. "Half-shifted and clawed one of their she-wolves across the face. Redmere wants her in their silver cells for three nights."

He didn't need to say the rest. Rosie and I shared a face. Three nights under her name would be easy.

"Or," he went on, "I stand before the Elders at the next full moon and reject you. Formally. Rosie's the one who stayed with me these three years. Maybe I should stop pretending otherwise."

The floor seemed to tilt under me.

He had no idea. Not one of them did.

The Coldwater healer had told me the truth the day before my release. My organs were shutting down. Something had been wearing me away for years—poison, she believed, though she'd never found the source. What still held me together was the bond.

"Keep your mate close," she'd said. "That bond is all you've got left. Lose it, and you're looking at weeks. Maybe not even that."

Silas thought he was holding my heart hostage. He was holding my life.

I didn't answer fast enough, and my mother rounded on me.

"You shamed this family three years ago," she snapped. "Rosie gave up three months for your father—three whole months—while you sat in Coldwater paying for your own mistakes. Now she needs three nights, and you have to think about it?"

"Same as always," my father said. His heart had been weak for years, and the disappointment on his face aged him further. "Ivy first. Everyone else second."

Silas moved closer. "I defended you, Ivy. I told the whole pack you weren't what they said. I'm starting to think they were right."

This was the man who used to say he could find me in a crowd with his eyes shut. The only person who had ever picked me over my sister.

He couldn't even look at me now.

Not that it mattered.

Refuse, and he'd reject me. The bond would snap, and I'd die.

Agree, and I'd spend three nights in silver, two hours from him. I'd die then, too.

There was no version of this where I lived.

"Fine," I said. "I'll go."

The whole room breathed out.

"Good," my mother said. "Finally you're learning."

"Once you're back," my father added, "maybe we'll let you help at the shop again. Little things. We'll see."

Even Silas's shoulders loosened. "I'll hold off on the rejection. We'll talk when you're home."

A laugh almost escaped me.

They were making plans for afterward. As though I had an afterward.

"Three nights won't kill you," my mother said, gentler now. "You did three years. When you're home, I'll make pot roast, and we'll all sit down to dinner together. Like a real family."

It was the kindest she'd sounded since I came through the door.

Three years ago, she'd slapped me in front of the enforcers and called me a disgrace. She never came to Coldwater. Not once. And now, because I'd agreed to carry my sister's name into a cell, she was offering to cook.

All I had to do to earn their kindness was be useful to Rosie.

I wondered whether any of them would feel it when I didn't come home.

Rosie appeared in the hallway, touching a tissue to her eyes, and wrapped me in a hug.

"Thank you," she breathed. "I knew you'd say yes."

As she let go, her eyes caught mine for a heartbeat. Cold. Satisfied.

Then she was back with our parents, and they folded around her—stroking her hair, promising it would all be fine.

Silas went to her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

The four of them stood by the fire, glowing gold.

I was still in the front hall, my Coldwater bag on my shoulder.

From there, they looked like a family portrait.

I just wasn't in the frame.