Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Aria’s POV

I woke up wrong.

That’s the only way I can describe it. My mouth was dry and my head was heavy, and I felt like I’d been dragged up from somewhere much deeper than sleep, the kind of surfacing where you can’t remember lying down. The empty cup was still sitting where I’d left it.

I didn’t look at it twice.

Nerves, I told myself. The ceremony. The long day. Everything.

Something was off with me after that, and I couldn’t name it.

I’d catch my scent on my sleeve, and it would read strange and sour underneath, like milk two days past. Wolves’ nostrils flared when I passed, and their faces did something small and confused before they looked away. I checked my herbs. I washed everything I owned twice.

It didn’t help.

And every evening Celeste came with more tea.

“You still look wrecked,” she’d say, pressing the cup into my hands. “Drink.”

I drank. Every time. Grateful, every time, for the one wolf who noticed I was tired.

Roman found me in the yard three days before the full moon.

I was crossing to the eastern line with my kit when he stepped into my path with half the academy watching, and I knew from the set of his shoulders that this was going to be bad.

“Goddess,” he said, loud enough to carry. “It’s the fat pig.”

The yard went quiet, then not quiet.

“You stink,” he went on, circling me, playing to the fence. “Do you know that? You walk through here, and the whole yard smells like something died in the herb hole. Stay in it. Nobody wants to look at you.”

I stood there.

“Say something,” Roman said. “Or can’t you? Too much effort?”

His eyes flicked to the watching wolves. Checking. Measuring how it landed.

They laughed.

The whole fence line, the trainees, the beautiful high-born females who clustered near Roman for the status of standing close, all of them laughing at once, and that sound was worse than anything he said. A whole pack agreeing out loud about exactly what I was worth.

Nobody said a word for me.

Two years of healing these wolves. Not one voice.

I didn’t cry.

I gathered my kit off the ground where he’d made me drop it, and I straightened my spine, and I walked out of that yard without giving a single one of them the sight of me breaking, because that was the one thing I still owned, and I wasn’t handing it over.

I made it all the way to the healing house.

Then my hands started shaking so hard I couldn’t get the kit open.

Celeste found me like that.

“I heard,” she said, and pulled me into a hug. “He’s disgusting. He’s an absolute pig himself, and everyone laughing along with him is worse. You deserve so much better than this pack, Aria.”

I held onto her.

She was the only thing holding me together, and I knew it, and I didn’t care how pathetic that was.

“Can I ask you something?” she said, after a while. Her voice was very gentle. “When he’s near you. What does it feel like?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just that you act strange when he’s close. That’s all.” She smoothed my hair back. “Forget I asked.”

I told her it was nothing.

She smiled and let it go, and I didn’t think about it again.

Here’s the thing that made none of it make sense.

Before all this, Roman Vale had been near me exactly twice. Once months ago, when he came to the healing house with a torn muscle and stared over my head the entire time while my wolf turned over inside me for the first time in my life. Once, days ago, kneeling over Doran’s shoulder, when he stepped around me like I was a stone in the path.

Twice.

Both times, he looked straight through me like I wasn’t there.

So why he’d suddenly decided I was worth hating, I couldn’t work out at all.

And then he started turning up.

He came to the healing house with a scrape on his forearm that a pup could have handled. He was at the herb store when I went for supplies, standing there with no reason to be standing there. He was on the eastern path when I walked it, and it wasn’t his path.

Three times in two days.

I had no framework for it. None.

Because when nobody was watching, he was somebody else.

The performance dropped clean off him. He got quiet. Slower. He held out his arm for the scrape and didn’t say anything cutting, and when I started working, he watched my hands instead of the door.

“How do you do that?” he said.

“Do what?”

“Close it that fast. Doran’s shoulder healed in half the time it should have.” He wasn’t sneering. That was the thing. “Nobody else here can do that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just feel where it’s torn.”

He didn’t fill the silence after that.

He just looked at me. At my face. Like, there was a person attached to it.

I couldn’t reconcile the two of them.

The wolf who called me a pig in front of a hundred wolves and the wolf who asked about my herb work and actually waited for the answer. One of them had to be a lie, and I knew which one I wanted to be the lie, which is exactly why I couldn’t trust myself about it.

That stubborn little ember lifted its head anyway.

I stamped on it. It came back up.

Then he did it again, worse.

Doran was there, and the whole fence line, and I was walking past with an armful of linens when Roman raised his voice.

“There she is. Pack’s prize sow.” He grinned at Doran. “Do us a favor and skip the ceremony, will you? Save the Goddess the embarrassment. There isn’t a wolf alive who’d want to be named that.”

The laughter came again.

And I understood, standing there with my arms full, that I’d imagined the whole thing. The quiet. The questions. There was no other Roman. There was just this one, and I’d been stupid enough to hope.

That was the part that actually hurt.

But he didn’t look at me after he said it.

He turned away before the laughing stopped, and when Doran said something to him, Roman snapped at him hard enough that Doran’s head went back.

Then he walked off alone.

I noticed it. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

The storm came in that evening.

It emptied the yard in minutes, everyone running for cover, rain coming down so hard it turned the paths to running mud and drowned out every other sound. I was out in it because a wolf on the eastern line had a wound going bad, and nobody else was going to walk through that to reach him.

I was soaked walking back.

And Roman Vale was standing in the middle of the path in the rain, alone.

No crowd. No Doran. No fence line of laughing females.

Just him, hair plastered flat, shirt stuck to him, standing there like a wolf who’d been circling something for days and had finally run out of room.

I was cold and wet, and I had run completely out of patience.

“What is wrong with you?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“You call me a pig in front of the whole pack, and then you show up at my herb store with an injury you don’t have. You tell them I stink, and then you ask me about my work. Pick one.” My voice cracked, and I hated it. “Just pick one, Roman, because I can’t keep—”

“I can’t stop.”

“What?”

“I can’t stop,” he said again. The rain was running off his jaw. “When you’re near me, something happens, and I don’t know what it is, and I’ve tried to make it stop for months.” He shook his head like he was angry at himself. “Every time I see you, it gets worse. So I—”

“So you humiliate me.”

“Yes.”

At least he didn’t dress it up.

“You’re a coward,” I said. “You care more about how you look to them than about anything true. That’s all you are.”

“I know,” he said.

And that was the first honest thing I’d ever heard him say.

Then he crossed the distance between us and kissed me.

I don’t know which of us moved first, honestly. One second there was rain between us and the next there wasn’t, his hand at the back of my neck, mine fisted in his soaked shirt, and my wolf —

My small, quiet, faint little wolf came awake.

All at once. Roaring. Like something that had been asleep my whole life and had just been shaken by the shoulders, and it knew him, it knew him, and for the first time I understood that whatever the pull was, it wasn’t foolishness and it wasn’t my hopeless heart making things up.

It was real.

He made a sound against my mouth like it hurt him.

“I’ve been trying not to do that for months,” he said.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

We got out of the rain.

And he was different isn’t a big enough word. He was gentle. He looked at me like there was nothing about me to be ashamed of, like the shape of me was something he wanted rather than something to apologize for, and he said my name, my actual name, over and over.

Nobody had ever wanted me before.

Not once, in twenty-two years, had anyone looked at me like that.

For one night, Roman Vale was mine.

By morning he was already gone from me.

I woke up, and he was dressing with his back to me, and the distance was back in his shoulders before he’d even finished, sliding over him like armor going on piece by piece.

He didn’t say anything about the night.

“Nobody can know about this,” he said, at the door. Not looking at me. “Ever.”

Then he left.

I lay there while the sun came up.

And I did what I have always done, which is tell myself a story I can survive on.

He was frightened, I decided. The wolf in the rain was the real one, and the wolf in the yard was the mask, and he’d said nobody can know because he wasn’t ready, not because it meant nothing. He’d come and find me before the full moon. He’d look at me the way he had last night, and the ember I’d been stamping on for months would finally be allowed to burn.

Three days.

I walked back to the healing house through the wet dawn, holding it all close to my chest like something precious, hope burning brighter than it ever had in my whole life.

I didn’t know my scent was still curdling under my skin.

I didn’t know what Roman Vale was going to do to me in front of the entire pack when the moon came up.

And I didn’t know, walking home in the mud with rain still in my hair, that the night in the rain had left a second heartbeat behind.