Chapter 10

Wren's POV

Rex didn't say a word to me on the walk over, and I didn't say one to him. He took the path along the inner wall and moved like the ground owed him something.

I felt it the whole way, eyes on the back of my neck, the low mutter picking up again as soon as we'd gone by. I knew what it said without hearing it. The fat wolfless who yelled at a Beta's son-in-law this morning, walking behind the Alpha King like a hired hand. By nightfall there would be three versions going around. I didn't mind a single one of them. Talk was the whole point of what I did today.

His house sat at the top of a low rise under a stand of old pines. Stone on the bottom, dark wood on top, a long porch, and two windows already lit even in the middle of the day. It was quiet enough up there that I could hear pine needles ticking on the roof.

"Registry first," he said, and held the door for me.

The office just off the hall had a desk, a ledger, and two women in it. The older one had gray in her hair and a ring of keys on her belt. The younger one had her pen up before we cleared the doorway. They both looked at us at the exact same moment and put on the exact same polite, professional smile that never got anywhere near their eyes.

"Name and pack."

"Wren Ashwood. Blackwood."

"Length of stay?"

"Open-ended," Rex said. "Until her complaint is filed and an investigator is named."

The pen stopped for half a second. Then it started again, even and steady. But before she wrote, her eyes went left. Just once. Just a flick. And the older one's chin dropped about a centimeter and came back up, and neither of them made a sound out loud.

Same desk. Same room. Not one word spoken.

I'd have bet my last coin they were talking up a storm on the mind-link. I couldn't hear it, and honestly I was glad. Whatever it was, I didn't need to know.

"Under my protection," Rex said. "Second floor, the corner room, the one with the lock. She keeps the key. No spares, nobody walks in on her."

"Yes, Alpha King."

Then he turned to me, and his voice came down a notch. Not soft. Lower. "Food comes up inside the hour. The housekeeper's downstairs if you need something small. Anything that isn't small, you come find me at the east hall. Don't walk past the inner gate tonight."

He coughed once, short, and his jaw tightened around it. I pretended I hadn't noticed, because a man like that would rather bleed out than be fussed over.

"Thank you," I said.

He left. The door shut with a soft, heavy click, and I swear the whole hall breathed out.

The older woman leaned back in her chair. Ruth, said the little brass plate on the desk. She looked me over like I'd walked in wearing the crown jewels.

"So," she said. "How do you know our Alpha King?"

"I don't."

"Mm." She glanced at the younger one. The younger one glanced back. "That's funny. Nine years I've worked desks in this pack, and that man has never once asked where a visitor was sleeping. Not once. People come, people go, and the Alpha King doesn't care if they end up in a ditch."

"He's just keeping the process clean."

"He's thorough about a lot of things." She folded her arms. "He doesn't put people in this house. This house doesn't have people in it. And it definitely doesn't have she-wolves in it. Four weeks he's had the seat, and I've lost count of how many have found a reason to walk up this hill. Casseroles. A lost dog. One of them wanted to read him her poetry." She let that sit. "He didn't open the door for the poetry."

A laugh came out of me wrong, all air and no sound. "He's upholding justice. That's all this is."

"Mm-hm."

"Really. I'm a visitor. He doesn't want me dead before the paperwork's finished."

"Sure." Ruth nodded, slow and agreeable, in the way that means nothing at all. "Because keeping a visitor breathing is a job for a bedroll in the hall and a guard on the gate. I'd agree with that. Putting her in the one locked room in his own house, I'd have to check which department that comes under."

"That's a big house. He probably has rooms he never uses."

She looked at me a second longer, and then she had the good manners to let it go, which I appreciated more than she knew.

"Can you people really talk about your Alpha like this?" I asked. "To whoever walks in off the road?"

Her face went flat and serious in about a quarter of a second. "Absolutely not."

I believed her. Then she grinned at me, wide and easy, and came around the desk for my bag.

"But you're the one he walked in here himself, aren't you," she said. "You don't count as whoever walks in off the road."

She took me up a back staircase to the corner room. It had a bed with real sheets, a window over the pines, a pitcher and basin on the washstand, and a door that bolted from the inside. She set a stack of towels on the chair, told me food would be up in twenty minutes, and shut the door.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap and just breathed. Three years I had slept in a storage room next to a bucket of water. This morning I had slapped a man in front of two hundred wolves. Now I had sheets.

The food came: stew, bread, cold milk, more than I could finish, which hadn't happened to me in a long time. I finished all of it anyway, wiped the bowl with the last of the bread, and then the tiredness came down on me like a rockslide and I was gone before I knew I'd laid down.

I don't remember dreaming much. I remember gray water going down my arms and coming off in strings, and the quiet of that stone cottage where nothing had ever tried to kill me.

When I woke, the light at the window had gone gold and the house was silent. I ran the water hot, which was still a luxury I didn't trust, and stood under it until my shoulders gave up.

Then I looked in the mirror.

The skin under my eyes had gone smooth. Not perfect, not close to it, but the gray-yellow that had been sitting on me like a coat for three years had thinned, and the lines around my mouth were softer, and when I turned sideways my jaw looked like a jaw instead of a pillow. My waist, I put both hands on it because I had to check, had given up maybe a finger's width of ground.

I stood there dripping and did the math. Twenty miles. That was a big night for a body that hadn't run in years. That had to be it. Loosen the fat, drain the water, get real sleep. Nothing mystical about it.

Astrid made a sound in the back of my head like a cat that had just knocked a glass off a table on purpose.

"You," she said, "are welcome."

"For what?"

"All of it. The skin. The waist. The rest of you, slowly." She yawned, long and rude. "That's my work." She stretched. "Though I can clean out what's already sitting in you, I can't run for you. If you want the body under the body, you eat less and you move more, and you do it every day until it's boring. That's the deal. I just make it possible."

I looked at myself in the mirror one more time.

Give me three month.