Chapter 4

Chloe's POV

"Not always fast. Sometimes it just doesn't leave." She picked at the edge of her napkin with one nail. "He hasn't been able to shift in months, maybe longer. His wolf has gone quiet. The word they use for it is sleeping."

"How do you know all this?"

"Because I'm in the territory and nobody there can keep their mouth shut," she said. "Half of it is my mother's friends and the other half is gossip that leaked out of that house. I'm not his doctor. I'm telling you what I've heard and what the family says out loud."

I put both hands around my cup.

"If the wolf is asleep," I said, "why does he die too?"

"Because that blow damaged both of them, not just the body. The wolf is the part that holds us together — something gets broken, it holds it, that's most of what it's for. Whatever the silver wrecked, the wolf used to be carrying it. Now it can't carry anything." She shrugged, an ugly, helpless sort of shrug. "They say he's been sliding since spring. How fast, I don't know. Nobody outside that house knows how fast."

I sat there while something in my head did work I didn't like.

The money. The house, the terms. Eleanor had every page prepared and an answer ready for every question, and every time she spoke about her son, her eyes slid off my face for a moment.

"Does he know she's doing this?" I said.

"Somebody's paying for it," Rachel said. "That's not a mother who's planning to say to her son, come and thank me for getting you a wife."

I picked up the cup and drank from it, and by then it had gone cold.

"All right then," I said. "It's a contract. If it ends in a year, I take what's mine and I go, and I won't be sitting around in black. I wasn't marrying for love, so a short one is simpler anyway. Saves everybody the pretending."

I heard myself say it. My face didn't move.

Rachel didn't laugh, and she didn't take the step I'd handed her. "Have you thought about why they need a wife this month?"

I shook my head.

"He may not hold on much longer," she said slowly, still not looking at me. "They want you to give the Vances blood, Chloe. Whatever they promised you, don't assume the way out is where you think it is."

"Do you know something?"

"I'm telling you I don't know," she said. "Neither do you. And you signed."

Her phone buzzed on the table, face up. She killed it without looking and turned it over, and ten seconds later it went again and she glanced at it — a quick glance, the kind I'd have called nothing at all if I didn't know exactly what the word Mom looks like on her screen.

She hung up again. I looked at her irritated face and understood, all at once, that she had family trouble to solve too, the same as me.

I was just about to ask when Rachel stopped talking. She turned her head toward the window and held up one finger, and maybe two seconds later I heard a car door close out on the street.

A dark car slid into the space along the curb. The man who got out didn't hurry. He came around the body of the car and up onto the sidewalk, and when he pushed the shop door open the rain and the cold came in with him and both of us looked up.

Rachel got there first, and then she said, low, "He's one too."

Dark hair cropped short, gray eyes that swept the room once and came back. He looked at the two of us, at the aisle beside the table, and then came around from the far side.

"Miss Davis." He checked whether I wanted to shake before he offered the hand. "Ethan Brooks. I work for Mr. Vance."

She didn't move aside. She looked at me and waited for me to speak.

"What does Mr. Vance want?"

"It's an invitation to meet."

I looked at Rachel. She was already reaching for her coat.

"I'm not putting you in a car and driving you to a part of town I don't know with a man I just met."

"Mr. Vance will see her alone," Ethan said.

Rachel got her arms into the sleeves and pulled her hair out of the collar. "I know exactly how your kind talk about a marriage to a human. I'll sit outside. When the door opens I'll be there, which is worth more than a text at midnight saying she got home safe."

Ethan looked at her for a moment. "Fine," he said.

I sat in the back with Rachel and watched the wet street slide away, and said nothing clever, because I had nothing clever left.

The Obsidian Club occupied the bottom two floors of a stone building. The man on the door knew Ethan and moved aside without being asked. That was the only thing about the place that read as power; the rest of it was dark wood and low lamps and people who had been drinking for two or three hours. Nobody turned around.

Ethan took us down a side corridor where the music fell away, quieter and then quieter still, and then he stopped at a door and turned and put himself in front of Rachel.

"This is where I have to ask you to wait outside."

Rachel didn't back up.

I put my hand on her arm. "I'll go in and hear him out. That's all. Wait at the door."

"Don't agree to a single word in there just because he looks at you like that. Whatever he says, say you'll think about it."

"I know."

Ethan knocked twice and waited. A voice answered from inside, one I didn't recognize, and then he pushed the door open and stepped aside.

The room was smaller than I'd expected. A sofa along the wall, a low table, a lamp turned down, and another door further in with light under it. Nothing in there was trying to frighten anyone. It was a room a man would use when he came here to work rather than to be seen.

He was sitting at the end of the sofa, phone face down, one arm along the back of it.

For a second and a half he was just a man in a dark room, younger than I'd built him into in my head, good-looking enough to make everything harder. Then I got closer and it changed. The skin was too white to be healthy white, and there was a gray under his eyes that had nothing to do with the lamp.

Green eyes. Wet green, like something under water.

"Miss Davis." His voice was low and flat and went into me like a nail.

I stopped. I didn't sit, didn't say hello, said nothing at all — because the thing that had been holding me up for eight years suddenly came down.

My mother's coat, her arm, the slack way she stood against the rail. A man's hand closing around her elbow and pulling her back a step; and twenty meters under her, the river running out from beneath the bridge.