Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Brianna

Witch. The word hung in the air—but before I could answer, he rejected it himself.

His grip stayed locked on my wrist, thumb grinding across the last inch of skin on my inner forearm. Then the motion slowed, the way a hound stops dead at the end of a scent trail.

"No." His eyes narrowed, voice dropping low. "No trace of dark magic on you. You're no witch."

I hadn't even finished releasing the breath I was holding when he closed in another step. Those long fingers tightened, and my wrist bones ground together audibly, pain detonating up my arm and into my shoulder.

"Then what are you?"

"Let go! I just heal fast—" The pain tore the words out of me, my voice cracking. "I still feel it!"

To my shock, he actually released me.

The instant his grip vanished, the raw burn of it still smoldered on my wrist. But before I could retreat even half a step, his arm was already around me, hauling me in, his other hand clamping the back of my neck—not violence. Control. Restraint measured to the inch:

I couldn't move, and I couldn't have pointed to a single mark to accuse him with. He stared down at me, close enough that I could see the light splintering in his eyes like cracked ice.

"Talk."

Two knocks sounded at the door.

"Alpha?" A guard's voice filtered through the wood, hesitant. "Is everything—"

" Out."

One word. The breathing beyond the door stopped, then footsteps retreated.

Silence settled back over the room. Silence deep enough to hear the last log collapsing in the fireplace. Deep enough to hear my own heartbeat slamming, over and over, against the arm he had braced across me.

I swallowed against a throat gone paper-dry, and began.

"My name is Brianna. Brianna Duskwood." I said it slowly. "Alpha Adam's younger daughter. You weren't wrong—I'm not Paige."

I braced for the explosion. For him to demand answers about the switched bride, about the sheer nerve of my father's deception.

But not a ripple crossed his face. As if the fact that Duskwood had swapped out his bride mattered less to him than the ruined flowers on the carpet.

"The name doesn't interest me," he said. "The power. Where does it come from?"

And that was the question I couldn't answer.

"...I don't know."

His eyes cooled by a degree. I rushed on, spilling out what I'd kept clenched inside me for twenty years—

"I've been this way since I was born. Skinned knees healed by the next morning. Burned palms without so much as a mark left behind. No one taught me. No one gave me anything." My mouth twisted. "You won't believe this, but no one ever noticed. In Duskwood, a daughter born without a wolf isn't worth a second glance—not even when she's being beaten. Who's going to count the scars that aren't on a worthless girl's body?"

He didn't interrupt.

"When I got older, I figured it out on my own." My voice dropped. "The moment anyone learned what I was, nothing good would come of it. Wolfless already makes you worthless. Add one impossible thing that can't be explained—and you're not worthless anymore. You're a monster. So I hid it. From everyone. For twenty years."

I lifted my eyes to his.

"You're the first person who knows."

The words ran out. The room sank back into that thick, viscous silence. He finally released his hold on me, but he didn't move away. I watched him bend down and pick the dagger up out of the scattered flowers. The blade turned a half-circle between his fingers, my blood not yet dry on the steel.

A long moment passed before he spoke.

"A woman who kept a secret for twenty years," he said, "lays the whole thing bare on the first night she meets me."

He looked up, and with a lazy flick, the dagger's point came to rest aimed at my heart. "Tell me why I shouldn't believe you're a spy they planted. Power like yours, in an enemy's hands—that's no small threat."

I had asked myself that same question a hundred times, through the long night before they sewed me into this dress.

So the answer was ready.

"You already know why. You felt it yourself, the moment you saw my arm heal." I stared down the blade and gave him every word, one at a time. "The instant this secret gets out, the world will call me a monster. A witch. They'll bind me to a stake and light the fire—and when the fire doesn't kill me, they'll try something else. And something else after that. One method at a time, until they find the one that finally works."

I opened both hands, palms up. Empty. I had already handed over everything I owned.

"I have nothing left. Nothing but the one secret that could get me killed—and I just placed it in your hands myself."

"Is that not proof enough?"

He said nothing.

Those eyes moved over my face like a man appraising the spoils of war— threat, asset, or dead weight? Firelight flickered across the hard line of his jaw, and I could read nothing in it. Nothing at all.

I stood amid the wreckage of white roses, palms damp, waiting for his verdict.