Chapter 3
Chloe's POV
Eleanor raised her eyes.
"I want Elias to have a settled home."
"There can't be any shortage of people who'd marry into the Vances." I paused. "You'd be better off matching him with one of your own."
She didn't answer straight away. She picked up her cup and didn't drink from it.
"A great many marriages involve more than two people," she said. "We don't need to negotiate terms with another wolf family."
I looked at her.
"And my family has nothing to negotiate with."
"You're negotiating with me right now, Chloe."
She said it gently. What I heard was that my question was still sitting on the table.
No powerful family, no territory, no money to speak of. She knew all of that, and it might even be the reason she'd picked me.
But there was still something she hadn't finished saying.
"And your son? He's not here today?"
"He's in treatment."
That might be the real thing.
"Treatment for what?"
"An old injury." She set the cup down. "He has a medical team looking after him, and he's still handling some work. I'll arrange for the two of you to meet afterward."
"Does he want this?"
Eleanor looked at me for a moment.
"I'll talk to him."
Beside me my father shifted, as though he wanted to answer for somebody. I didn't look at him.
She turned the document to the place where it needed signing. I looked down at it. The pen was already laid beside it.
I could have kept asking. About the old injury, about the things she hadn't answered, about a man who hadn't even shown his face.
But I could also see what was already written down. The company could keep its doors open. My father wouldn't have my mother to hold over me anymore. And the part that belonged to me wouldn't pass through his hands.
"These arrangements won't go through my father again. Is that right?"
"No. You'll receive your own documents and your own funds, directly."
I picked up the pen and signed my name.
Eleanor put one copy away and handed me the other, warmer than she'd been when we walked in.
"I'll have someone contact you about what comes next."
I put the papers in my bag. By the time I had the zipper closed, my father was on his feet, thanking her with his whole face.
The car had barely cleared the estate before he started. The company could breathe again, and once the money came through he'd clear everything that was owed.
"I knew this was the right thing to do," he said. "And once we've got the Vance connection—"
"There's no afterward."
He glanced at me. "What?"
"Your company's saved. Don't come to me again."
The smile went off Martin's face by degrees.
"Chloe. I'm your father."
I watched the road and said nothing.
In a year of not calling, it seemed he hadn't needed to remind himself of that.
"You're going to do this to me over one meeting?"
I turned my head.
"It wasn't one meeting. You handed my details to strangers, you worked out the terms, and then you used my mother to get me in the car."
"I was doing it for—"
"Don't say for me."
He gripped the wheel and didn't speak for a while.
"You really want to leave it like this?"
"Yes."
The word came out lighter than I expected.
"Don't call me again, and don't send anyone else. Your company is your problem."
He didn't say anything else.
Once we were back in the city I told him to pull over. He stopped the car but didn't get out to help with my bag. I took my things, shut the door, and didn't look back at him.
Walking, I opened my bag and looked at the papers I'd just signed.
I had agreed to marry a stranger. He hadn't appeared. His mother hadn't said much of anything when the subject of his injury came up.
I couldn't tell whether I'd just stepped back from one cliff and walked straight at another.
My father had told my mother he loved her, and he betrayed her. Right up until last night, Tyler had been telling me he loved me.
I didn't want to hear anybody promise me a good future anymore.
I looked at the figure on the page again.
At least money doesn't lie.
I was putting the papers away and turning toward my apartment when the phone rang.
Rachel.
"You finally picked up. Are you back in Oakhaven?"
"Yes. Got in last night."
"Let's meet." she said, "Tell me what actually happened last night."
"The usual place?"
"Half an hour."
"Okay. There's something I need to tell you too."
Rowan Street coffee shop.
Rachel was already at the window table with her hand up. Her chestnut-red hair was pinned back loose enough that it was halfway to falling, her jacket was over the back of her chair, and her sleeves were shoved up past her elbows, which told me she'd been there more than an hour and had decided to stay the afternoon.
Two drinks in front of her, both still steaming, and a plate between them with the sandwich already cut in half.
I hadn't even gotten the bag off my shoulder before she pushed the plate across the table. "I'm guessing you haven't had a proper meal all day."
"You're always that sharp."
"Eat." The fork came over next. She reached across, hooked the strap off my arm, and dropped the bag on the empty chair beside me — no polite opening, no how was the drive, nothing that would have cost either of us anything. She remembers what I don't eat without being told. She moves things out of my way without being asked. Between the two of us, we have never needed a whole sentence to be polite.
I sat down and drank. The coffee was too hot and I drank it anyway.
"I saw the post," she said. "He hasn't contacted you again?"
"Three times. I hung up on all of them. In the messages he typed the e in my name three times over, a whole paragraph of it, which tells you how hard he was concentrating."
"Did he put hands on you?"
I turned my wrist over on the table. The ring of red had faded to a dirty yellow-green around the bone, and it hurt when I bent it past a certain angle, which I'd already found out twice that morning reaching for things.
"I slapped him and he let go."
Rachel put the fork down and left it there. "Tell me straight. Not the version you posted in the group."
So I gave her the parts that mattered. The early bus. The key on my ring. The cream coat over the arm of his sofa that wasn't mine. The two full seconds I'd stood in the entryway making sure before I walked in. And how the first thing out of his mouth hadn't been her name or an apology, but a demand to know why I was back.
Rachel swore loud enough that the woman at the next table turned around, then leaned back in her chair and asked, in a voice that was far too calm, "Can I go bite his throat out? It's doing this city a favor."
I laughed. It came out louder than I meant it to, and I had to set my cup down first. "I can't afford a werewolf's bail."
"You wouldn't be paying it."
"I'm serious, Rach."
"So am I," she said, and then she let it go. "Are you going back?"
"No." I said it before I'd decided to. "It still hurts. I'm not going to sit here and claim I'm made of stone — a year and a half isn't nothing. But I blocked him. I'm not spending the days ahead of me in arguments with him."
She watched me for a moment. "That's not the same as being fine."
"I know. But I'm not going to decide my whole future is worthless just because he is."
She nodded slowly, like she was filing it away, and then she asked about the thing I'd told her on the phone I had to say.
"I just came back from Blackwood."
Her eyebrows went up. "The Vances?"
I nodded, and turned my cup a quarter turn on the saucer and left it there. "Eleanor Vance is looking for a wife for her son. I signed."
Rachel's fork stopped in the air. She put it down. "Have you met him. Are you registered."
"No. Not yet."
"Chloe."
"Without it the company's gone," I said. "The arrears, the wages, the supplier who's already stopped shipping — I couldn't dig out of that hole in ten years. I don't want the work my mother put into that place to come to nothing."
"And there's money going straight into my own account," I added, and I said it the way I hoped a person sounds when she has thought it through.
She wasn't glad for me and she wasn't angry either, which told me something in itself: she probably already knew.
"Cancel it," she said. "Right now, today, while it's still a signature and not a registration."
"Why?"
She leaned in with her elbows on the table and dropped her voice low enough that I had to lean in too. "Do you know what's wrong with him. Not the things Eleanor told you. What you know yourself."
"An old injury. She said he's in treatment, that he has a medical team looking after him, that he's still handling work."
Rachel let a slow breath out through her nose and turned to look at the window, at the rain, anywhere but me.
"There was a clash over Vance territory," she said. "A few years back, and it went bad. He took silver. Everybody says so, but nobody in the pack says it like a rumor — they say it the way you'd say the road ahead is closed. The silver is still in him. It never came out."
"Silver." I turned the word over. "Is it going to kill him?"
