Chapter 2

The first memory that surfaced was a hospital room.

Isolde, thin as paper. The only thing on her that had any weight was her stomach, swollen and hard against the white sheets.

She was breathing because a machine was making her breathe. Her eyes were closed. The monitors by her bed showed numbers that the doctor clearly wasn't happy about.

The Pack physician delivered the news without softening it.

"Brain activity is negligible. The chance of meaningful recovery is essentially zero."

He paused.

"As for the pregnancy — her condition makes termination too dangerous. She'll have to carry to term."

Vivienne made a sound I'd never heard from her before. She collapsed against the bed and held Isolde's hand and shook.

In the memory, I was standing at the far side of the room.

I wasn't crying. I wasn't moving. I was just standing there, looking at nothing.

In the Packhouse hall, the crowd erupted.

"Her best friend is lying brain-dead and she can't even be bothered to look at her."

"She doesn't have an ounce of guilt in her. She set Isolde up and now she's standing there like she's waiting for a bus."

"It had to be her. She was jealous. She sold Isolde out and let her take the fall."

In the memory, Cael moved fast.

He grabbed a fistful of my hair from behind and dragged me across the room until my knees hit the tile floor beside Isolde's bed. Then he put his hand on the back of my head and pushed down, once, hard, into the floor.

"Why won't you talk?"

He pushed again.

"What has Hargrove Pack ever done to you? What have I ever done to you that wasn't give you everything?"

"Do you have any idea what it's like to watch your family fall apart and know you're the only one who can fix it and choose not to?"

I took it. I said nothing.

Back in the hall, Vivienne came at me from the side, nails first. She raked them across my cheek and kept going.

Then she reached for the silver needle at the base of my skull and shoved it deeper herself.

The pain split something open behind my eyes.

Blood hit the floor.

Some of it caught the hem of Cael's shirt. He looked down at it. He turned away.

"Push further," he said to the witch. "I want everything."

The spell lurched, and the memory jumped.

The image in the air above the hall shifted to a different night.

The Packhouse lower level. The interrogation room. The same night the Pack warriors brought everyone home from Crescent Bay.

Cael had separated me from the others.

He brought the rescued She-wolves in one by one.

Some of them could barely walk. Some of them had bruises I recognized because I had the same ones. He led them through the door and then he looked at me and said one word.

"Kneel."

I knelt.

"You knew who set this up. You knew how to end it. Every day you stayed quiet, these She-wolves paid for it."

He brought them forward, one at a time, close enough that I could see their faces clearly.

"You owe them. So you're going to kneel in front of every single one of them. And when you're done, you're going to tell me who did this."

I knelt through all of them.

One of the She-wolves broke down crying the moment she saw me. Another couldn't look at me at all. One was shaking so badly she had to lean against the wall just to stay upright.

I stayed on the floor and I didn't say a word.

When the last one was led out, Cael crouched down in front of me. His voice had gone very quiet.

"I married you, Seren. I went back into that place for you personally."

"Give me a name."

I looked at him. I said nothing.

He stood up and walked out.

The memory dissolved.

Back in the Packhouse hall, the crowd's anger had built into something uglier.

"She knelt in front of all of them and still kept her mouth shut. That's not a victim. That's someone covering their tracks."

"Innocent She-wolves kneel for no one. The fact that she did it without a word just proves she knew she was guilty."

"She spent months in that resort as the top earner. She wasn't a prisoner — she ran the place. Isolde was just in her way."

"She has no bloodline, no Pack of her own. No one to lose. Of course she sold out the she-wolf who gave her a home."

Vivienne had stopped crying. Something else had taken over.

She grabbed my face in both hands and turned it toward her phone. On the screen was a photo of Isolde's medical chart, the latest update from this morning.

Vitals declining. Fetal movement still present.

"My daughter is dying by the inch and that baby is going to come into the world without a mother because of you."

"You don't get to sit there breathing while she can't."

She let go of my face and turned to the witch.

"Pull everything out of her. Every memory she has. I don't care what it costs."

The witch's apprentice stepped forward, voice low.

"Luna — her Wolf Soul is already showing stress fractures. If we push any further, the damage may be permanent—"

Vivienne's eyes didn't move from my face.

"Then it's permanent. Keep going."