Chapter 4

Eve's POV

Victor stood at the top of the stone steps, one hand loose at his side, travel-worn in a way that somehow didn't diminish him at all.

My foster brother.

Silverleaf Pack's future Alpha, the one everyone already treated like he'd inherited the title years ago.

He had Ella's cheekbones and none of her warmth, and he'd spent every year of my time in this house watching me from a careful, measured distance, the way you'd watch something you hadn't decided what to do with yet.

Not hostile, exactly.

Just perpetually guarded.

Perpetually calculating.

I used to lie awake some nights trying to figure out what I'd done wrong, why he looked at me like I was a variable he hadn't accounted for.

Eventually I stopped trying to figure it out and just accepted it as fact: Victor tolerated my presence in this house the way you tolerate a draft you can't locate the source of.

Then came the moon festival a year ago, and a kiss I hadn't seen coming that made everything worse in ways I still couldn't fully map.

We didn't talk about it.

He left for his training circuit two weeks later, gone from Silverleaf for the better part of a year, and I'd had exactly enough time to convince myself that the distance was fine, that I'd stopped thinking about it, that it didn't matter.

I hadn't expected him back today.

I hadn't expected him at all.

The afternoon light cut in behind him and turned him into something more like a shape than a person for just a second, and that second was enough for my pulse to do something stupid.

He wasn't looking at Vera.

He was looking at me.

That particular kind of looking, not concern, not anger, not even judgment exactly, more like he was taking a measurement.

"Put away the murderous intent on you," he said. "Come in."

Vera straightened first.

Something in her posture shifted, the instinctive compression of a lower-ranked wolf under a higher one's eye.

My body didn't know how to fold itself into deference the way theirs did.

Victor had felt it, the full weight of what I'd been about to do, and he'd named it without flinching, which meant he'd also already decided what he'd do if I pushed it any further.

So I let my hands open.

Vera moved past Victor without looking at me, already slipping back into the composed version of herself she wore inside the house.

But halfway to the door she cut sideways, two quick steps that brought her close enough, and her voice came down to almost nothing.

"You know how he gets about things he considers his," she said. "Ask yourself why he even bothered coming out here before he'd unpacked."

She didn't wait for a response. She was already moving again, past me and through the door, like she'd just made a casual observation about the weather.

I took three seconds.

Then I went inside.

The main hall smelled like pine resin and candle wax and something warmer underneath, roasted meat or fresh bread, the kind of smell that was engineered to mean home even to someone who had never quite managed to believe it.

From the conversation moving around the table, I gathered the rest of it in pieces. Victor was home to take his father's place, to be formally installed as Alpha of Silverleaf.

He was staying, permanently, in this house, on this land.

And for the first time all evening, some small, cowardly part of me was almost grateful for Renault's invitation to move in.

I stood at the edge of the room and nobody told me to come closer.

Nobody told me to leave, either.

That was the thing about this house. I was never quite invited and never quite expelled, just perpetually in the threshold, like a window someone had forgotten to close all the way.

Ella found me herself.

"Eve."

She lifted one hand and beckoned me across, and I went.

I sat beside her, close enough to smell the lavender she used in her hair, and the tightness in my chest dropped half a register.

She asked if I was eating enough at the Obsidian Estate.

She asked if the cold had gotten to me on the walk over.

Then, quieter, her fingers brushing my forearm for just a second.

"Any progress? Between you and Renault?"

I opened my mouth.

He told me to move in. Completely. He didn't ask, he just decided, and I don't know how to explain that to you in a way that doesn't sound like what it is.

The truth sat right there, heavy and impossible to dress up in a way.

"Mom." Vera's voice came from across the table, even, almost conversational. "Why would you ask that?"

Ella looked up.

"Everyone at the estate knows how he introduces her," Vera said.

She wasn't performing cruelty this time, that was almost worse.

She said it the way you'd say something everyone already understood, a clarification, not an attack.

"She's his companion. A pet project, basically. He finds it interesting to keep a human around, something different to come home to. Wolves who've seen them together say he'll get bored once the novelty runs out."

A small pause.

"If we get too attached to the idea of a formal connection, we're going to embarrass ourselves. That's all I'm saying."

The table went quiet.

Not completely, a spoon scraped somewhere, someone's chair shifted, but the particular quality of the silence changed.

The kind of silence that meant everyone had heard and nobody was going to be the one to answer it.

She's right.

The thought came before I could stop it, flat and certain, the way true things sometimes arrive with no drama at all.

She's not even wrong. That's exactly what he tells people.

I looked down at the table.

The grain of the wood.

The edge of my own knuckle.

"Eve." Victor's voice.

I looked up.

"I heard you've been Renault's companion for a year now."

His voice was even, controlled, but there was something underneath it that made the air feel thinner.

"Which means you two got together right after I left."

He leaned forward just slightly, enough that the distance between us felt deliberate.

"So yes, Eve. I think you should explain exactly how that happened."

I met Victor's eyes.

They were dark and steady and gave nothing back, a well you couldn't estimate the depth of just by looking down into it.