Chapter 3

Their laughter carried up the stairs like needles. I came down slowly, the pendant burning cold in my fist, each step a footfall on the bones of the last five years. Kieran’s study door was cracked open. He was on the phone, voice low. “…Yes, Mother. She put it on. Just like you said. This one worked.” I stopped breathing. Rowena said something. Kieran laughed, soft and smug. “A feral thing needs breaking. She can’t leave Silvercrest—she has nowhere to go and no wolf to run with. Relax. After the ceremony I’ll give her a little reward and she’ll fall back in line. She always does.” Seventy-two degrees in that hallway. I felt like I’d been dropped through ice. Five years of trying. Five years of swallowing glass. A performance. Choreographed by his mother. “Rhys?” Kieran’s voice went flat with contempt. “Some upstart Alpha with new territory and a helicopter. What does he know besides throwing money at problems? He can’t put a finger on this family.” Then—almost lazily— “No, she still drinks it. Every night. Honestly, Mother, five years of silverleaf and she never once asked why her wolf went quiet.” The hallway tilted. Silverleaf. The tea. The warm, bitter, floral tea his mother had pressed into my hands every single night since my first winter here. Silverleaf muzzles a wolf. Enough of it, long enough, and the wolf stops answering at all. They hadn’t just humiliated me. They’d gagged the part of me that could fight back. I pressed my palm flat against the wall so I wouldn’t fall. Deep in my chest, in that well she’d been drowning in for five years, something moved. Vesper. Faint. Furious. Alive. The study door swung open from the inside. Selene stopped short, surprise flashing across her face before it melted into sugar. “Wren! What are you doing out here? Come in, Kieran was just asking for you.” She grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the great hall hard enough that I stumbled. The antique velvet box slipped from my hand and hit the marble with a dull thud. She didn’t even look at it. She crossed the room, tucked herself under Kieran’s arm, and purred, “See? I told you Wren would be gracious.” Kieran’s eyes went to me. Then to the box on the floor. “Pick it up.” An order. In front of three hundred wolves. I looked at him. I looked at the woman in his arms. I looked at the empty box lying at my feet—five years of my life, hollowed out and lying on the floor. And I smiled. I lifted my foot. Not to pick it up. I kicked it. It skidded the length of the hall and cracked against the hearthstone. “The pendant is right here.” I raised it, glittering and cold, between two fingers. My voice carried into every corner of that room. “But that box isn’t worthy of it.” The air went solid. Kieran stared at me with a blackness I had never seen in him, not once in ten years. He was offended. He was losing control. And then he looked away—but his hand came to rest on Selene’s shoulder, his fingertips brushing the place where my crest should have hung. “Selene’s right,” he said, watching her and speaking to me. “Some things are simply meant for the right person.” I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t see what was in them. Because down in the dark where they’d buried her, my wolf had finally stopped howling. She’d started listening. And she wanted names.