Chapter 3

Aria's POV

I got out of that yard as fast as I could without running.

The mate pull was still humming through me, low and insistent, and all I wanted was to be somewhere no one could see my face before it gave away everything I was fighting to hold in. I crossed to the healing house and then past it to the little room behind that was mine, and I shut the door on the whole loud, watching pack.

The relief of it was enormous.

Four walls. A closed door. Nowhere anyone could read me.

I tried to work.

I told myself I'd restock the herb shelves, fold the clean linens, and do something with my hands until the day settled back into its ordinary shape. But my hands wouldn't quite settle, and my wolf was still restless under my skin from Roman passing so close, and no matter how many times I told myself it meant nothing, the pull didn't get any softer.

The crushing hadn't held.

It never really did, if I was honest. I'd been crushing this thing for months, and it kept surfacing, and today it had surfaced worse than ever, and I was so tired of pretending I didn't feel it.

So I stopped pretending to fold linens and went to the floorboard.

The loose one, in the corner, where I kept the only thing that was truly mine.

I lifted it and drew out the bundle of letters, and just holding them steadied something in me, the way it always did. This was where I went when the ache got too big to carry inside, when missing them pressed on my chest until I couldn't breathe around it. The letters were my one comfort. My one private thing in a life where I owned almost nothing, not even my name.

I untied the twine and unfolded the one on top, the one addressed only to home, and I read it again.

I don't know if you're angry with me or worried or if you've stopped thinking about me at all, it said, in my cramped, careful hand. I hope you're not. I hope you know I didn't leave because of anything you did. I left because I needed to find out who I was without all of it, without the name, without the doors that opened before I touched them. I needed to know if there was anything to me that was just mine.

I miss you so much it stops my breath some nights.

I miss the garden. I miss the way it felt to belong somewhere, even a place I was trying to escape.

I read it twice.

I always read them twice.

Under all of it, under the healer's calm and the practiced invisibility, there was just a wolf who wanted to be wanted.

That was the thing I could barely admit even to the letters. I ached to be seen. To be chosen. To have someone look at me and want me, the actual me, not a name and not a function, just the wolf I was underneath everything.

And some foolish, shameful part of me, the part I stamped on the second it lifted its head, wondered what it would be like to be wanted by anyone at all.

Let alone by him.

I stamped on it. Hard. But it had lifted its head, and I'd felt it, and I hated that I had.

My grandmother came back to me then, the way she did when I held the letters.

I could still feel her hands on my face, warm and dry and certain, the last time we were together. She was the one person in my whole life who'd looked at me and seen something, really seen it, when everyone else saw either the name or nothing at all. Losing her was one of the sharpest things folded into these letters, a grief I never quite set down.

You carry old blood, she'd told me, holding my face, her eyes fierce and bright. Something rare, sleeping in our line. It skips through the generations like an ember that never catches, and then one day it catches again. I've always thought it would catch on in you.

She'd said it like she was handing me something enormous.

Something precious.

I never believed her.

I still don't.

My wolf has always been small and faint inside me, quiet and ordinary, nothing rare or sleeping or waiting to wake. There's no ember in me. I've felt every inch of my wolf, and there's nothing ancient about it, nothing that skipped generations to land in me, and I decided a long time ago that the old blood was just a grandmother's love talking. A beautiful thing was said over a plain grandchild who needed to hear it.

Nothing more than that.

I loved her for saying it. I just couldn't make myself believe it, because I knew my wolf, and my wolf was nobody's ember.

I'd built my whole understanding of myself on that.

That I was fundamentally lesser. Softer, smaller, and weaker than the wolves around me, gifted only with the one strange talent for wounds that nobody credited anyway. It was why the Vale pack's cruelty landed as cleanly as it did, because some part of me had already agreed with them long before I ever arrived. They looked at me and saw nothing worth seeing, and the terrible thing was that so did I.

I tied the letters back up and slid them under the floorboard and set the board back in its place.

The ritual is done. A little of the ache let out onto paper, the way it always was. Enough to put myself back together with.

My thoughts went to the ceremony because they couldn't not.

The full moon was close now, and the Moon Ceremony with it, and I felt the familiar tangle of dread and hope twist through me. I knew I wasn't what the pack meant by worthy. I'd crushed the pull a hundred times. I'd told myself over and over that the night would name someone beautiful and strong for Roman and nothing for me, or something small and ordinary, and that would be that.

And still.

Still there was a stubborn little ember of hope that wouldn't go out, no matter how many times I smothered it, and I hated it a little for surviving. Hope was dangerous for a wolf like me. Hope was how you got hurt.

A knock at the door.

“Aria? It's me.”

Celeste's voice, warm and familiar through the wood, and my chest lifted despite everything. After a whole day of being invisible and unsettled and stamping down things I shouldn't feel, my friend had come to me. Of everyone in the pack, she'd come to find me in my little room behind the healing house.

I was helplessly, uncomplicatedly glad.

I opened the door without a second thought because there was no wolf in the world I trusted more.

Celeste came in holding a warm cup, and steam curled off the top of it.

“I brought you tea,” she said, and pressed it into my hands. “For your nerves. I know the ceremony's got you wound up, don't even pretend it hasn't. This'll help you sleep. You look like you haven't rested properly in days.”

I looked down at the cup, and something in my chest went soft the way it had over the pastry.

She could have been anywhere. She could have been up at the front of the pack with the wolves who mattered, the beautiful high-status wolves she belonged among. And instead she was here, in my cramped little room, bringing me tea before a frightening day, spending her care on me again.

“You didn't have to,” I said. “Celeste, really.”

“I wanted to.” She smiled. “Drink it while it's warm.”

I didn't see the way she watched me take the cup.

I know that now, turning it over after. There was a care in the way she watched, a shade too focused, her eyes tracking the tea rather than my face, waiting. But I didn't catch it. Trusting and tired and grateful, I was the last wolf in the world who'd have caught it.

I lifted the cup and drank.

It was warm and pleasant and tasted of nothing I could name as wrong, a little bitter under the sweetness maybe, but tea often was. I drank it down, grateful for the warmth of it and the warmth of her, the small domestic sweetness of a friend caring for me before a hard day, one of the few genuinely tender things in my whole isolated life.

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it all the way down.

Celeste's smile was perfectly, completely warm.

“Of course,” she said. “That's what friends are for.”

She stayed only long enough to see me finish the cup.

Then she made some light excuse about needing to be somewhere and slipped out, and I was alone, and a heaviness was already rolling over me thicker than the hour warranted. My limbs loosened. A fog came in, faster and denser than ordinary tiredness, pulling at me, and I set the empty cup down and thought nothing of it at all.

Just nerves, I told myself. Just exhaustion, finally catching up. Just the tea doing its soothing work, the way Celeste said it would.

I lay down.

The fog thickened.

And I sank into sleep, deep and uneasy, dreams pulling at the edges of me.

I couldn’t feel the thing that was happening as I slept.

I was unable to feel my scent beginning to shift, subtle and wrong, something in it curdling and turning beneath the surface, slow and quiet, changing into something that was not mine. Something the Goddess would read at the ceremony and find false. I slept through all of it, defenseless, trusting, with no idea anything had been done to me at all.

The tea was never kind.

The trap was already set.

And I slept right through the springing of it, dreaming uneasy dreams, while the one wolf I trusted more than anyone in the world finished poisoning the very thing my whole future would be judged by.