Chapter 3

Eve's POV

I knew exactly what she meant, and I knew before she'd even finished the sentence where this was going.

Coming back to Silverleaf carrying Renault's scent wasn't something that would pass without comment.

It never did.

To another pack's wolve it wasn't just a smell, it was a statement, something territorial and deliberate, the kind of thing that demanded a response.

And Vera had never needed much of an excuse to come after me.

The scent just gave her something to point at.

Something that looked, from the outside, like a legitimate grievance instead of four years of barely concealed contempt finally finding a shape it could use.

"I'm sure they'll survive it," I said.

Vera descended one step, unhurried.

"Do you know what the others are saying?" she asked.

No real question in it.

She already knew.

"They say Ella must have been out of her mind. Bringing a stray human into the manor. No scent. No wolf. No lineage."

I already knew where this was going.

I'd heard enough versions of it over four years to recognize the opening move.

So I just stood there and let her talk.

"You know what I've always found interesting? The wolves here think you're an oddity. No scent, no wolf, no business being in a pack house."

She looked me over, slowly, starting at my hair and ending somewhere around my coat collar.

"But you weren't exactly normal among humans either, were you. White hair. Those eyes. I imagine the humans weren't any kinder than the wolves turned out to be."

A small pause.

"You've never really fit anywhere. Not with them, not with us. You're the kind of thing that makes both sides uncomfortable just by existing."

Celina made a soft, appreciative sound behind her.

She wasn't wrong.

I'd thought that myself, more times than I could count.

After my parents died, I'd spent years just trying to get through each day without falling apart completely.

No home, no name that meant anything to anyone, nothing to hold onto.

And then there had been him.

A smile surfaced in my memory before I could stop it.

Unhurried, unguarded, the kind of smile that didn't know it was doing anything to you.

He'd found me half-starved in the Gray Sector and hadn't once looked at my white hair or my green eyes like they were a problem to solve.

He'd just handed me half a sandwich and asked if I knew what a minor chord was.

He lit up everything for a while.

That was the only way I ever knew how to describe it.

Then I was sixteen, and I lost him too.

I walked into the wolf forest after that.

Not to kill myself.

I'd promised him I wouldn't do that, and even now, even with everything else stripped away, I wasn't going to break the last promise I'd made to him.

But there was nothing left in it worth staying for.

Not anymore.

So I walked in and I let myself want it, just a little, just enough.

An accident.

A wrong step.

Something that would do what I couldn't, what I'd promised him I wouldn't, something that would finish it for me so I wouldn't have to break the last thing I had left of him.

What I found instead, maybe a quarter mile in, was Vera.

Tied up, beaten, left in the dirt by the men who'd taken her, a ugly little arrangement between some wolves who wanted money and some humans who knew how to move a child without leaving a trail.

She was fourteen years old and she was terrified and she was still alive.

So I got her out.

I didn't remember how, exactly.

My memory did that sometimes when things got too sharp, when my body was moving faster than my brain could process.

I'd come back to myself later with blood on my hands or dirt under my nails and only the vaguest sense of what I'd done in between.

All I knew for sure was that when Ella found us, Vera was breathing and the men weren't anywhere close.

When I woke up, Ella was sitting beside the bed.

She told me I didn't have to go back.

That she'd take me in.

That Silverleaf pack would be my home now.

"Mother looked at you," Vera continued, "and she had this expression. I've tried to describe it to people and I never quite get it right. Like she'd been told something. Like she thought the Moon Goddess had personally arranged the whole situation for her benefit."

She smiled finely.

"Which is a lovely thing to believe, I'm sure. It made her feel that taking in a stray human girl was spiritually significant rather than simply impractical."

Vera stepped close enough that there was only a fist's width of air between us.

"This family took you in against everything the other packs thought about it. We carried all of that. For you. For three years we carried it."

She paused, letting that settle.

"And what did you do with it? You turned around and walked straight into another pack's Alpha's bed. A man who doesn't even have the decency to call you anything real."

Her voice stayed even, almost gentle, which made it worse.

"Don't pretend you don't know what he tells people when your name comes up. Not partner. Not mate. Not anything that means something."

She tilted her head slightly.

"You know, I've always wondered if anyone has ever actually loved you. Really loved you. Not pitied you, not tolerated you, not kept you around out of convenience."

She let that breathe for a second.

"But then I think the real tragedy isn't that no one loves you. It's that the ones who tried ended up paying for it, didn't they? You're the kind of person that ruins people just by letting them care about you."

Something went white behind my eyes.

My pulse hit the back of my throat.

My hands were already closing into fists before I'd registered the movement.

I wanted to put my hands around her throat.

Every cell in my body was saying it, clear and unanimous in a way my thoughts almost never were.

Do it. Shut her up.

Make it so she can never again say anything that makes me think of him, anything that reaches in and finds that specific wound and presses down on it just to watch me bleed.

She took a step back.

Her face did something.

Real fear.

"Eve."

The voice came from behind and above both of us.

Low and unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't need to raise itself to fill a room, that carried weight the way stone carries weight, not by effort but by density.