Chapter 5
Elowen
The dress Nana had handed me that evening had been plain — undyed linen, a little loose through the shoulders — but it was clean, and it hadn't smelled like the Hollow, and pulling it on I'd let myself feel almost normal for a second.
"So where exactly is this job, Nana?"
"You'll see." She'd been fussing at my collar, tugging it straight the way she used to when I was seven and couldn't be trusted to dress myself for temple. "Don't fret. It won't be easy, mind — but you'll manage."
She'd been wrong about the first part, at least.
It was the pack's banquet — thrown for some Elder down from the capital, apparently — and I found that out roughly four seconds after walking through the servants' entrance and having a rag pressed into my hand.
A rag. After three years of the Hollow, a rag felt like being handed a holiday.
I got to the tables early, before the guests, and started polishing silver worth more than everything I'd ever owned. Head down. Hands moving. Don't think about who used to sit at tables like this instead of scrubbing them.
It didn't stay simple for long.
"Well, would you look at that." A voice, amused, pitched to carry. Some cousin of a cousin — the kind of face that had always hovered at the edges of every gathering I'd actually mattered at. "Our little prodigy warrior. Elowen. Three years of hard labor in that hollow wasn't punishment enough, so you came home to wipe our tables too?"
"Careful how close you stand." Another one, nose wrinkling theatrically. "That medicine stink is still all over her. Half tincture, half something worse — lycan rot, if you ask me. Imagine that getting into the linens before the Luna sits down."
I kept wiping.
I want to say it took effort to stay quiet. It didn't, and that was the strange part.
Three years and one very bad afternoon ago, words like that would have found the soft places in me and dug in. Now they just slid off, and underneath the numbness there was something almost funny about it.
Because here's the joke none of them would ever get. The Hollow was hell — the poison, the exhaustion, losing pieces of my own wolf a week at a time. But not once, in three years, did anyone down there smile at me while sharpening a knife behind their teeth. Nobody needed me small to feel tall. You did the work, nobody pretended it was something else, and that was the whole arrangement.
Up here, the arrangement came with a floor show.
I filed that away and kept polishing until the doors opened.
The hall filled fast, and it filled gold — chandeliers dripping light over silk and jewels, our Alpha and Luna at the head table looking every inch the part, foreign wolves I didn't recognize laughing too hard at jokes that weren't funny.
I carried trays through all of it. There was a particular ache in that I hadn't braced for — not my feet, not the weight of the tray, but the small useless part of me that still remembered exactly what this room felt like from the other side of the glass.
I'd danced in this hall once.
I set the thought down and picked up another tray.
Table six turned out to be my parents'.
I didn't clock it until I was already setting down the wine, and by then there was no redirecting. My mother's face cycled through three expressions in under a second. My father's hand froze halfway to his glass.
"Elowen." His voice dropped into something furious and strangled, low enough not to carry past the table. "This is how you support yourself? By humiliating us? In front of the entire pack?"
"Fuck — just keep walking." Celeste didn't even look at me, eyes already sweeping the room for someone worth her attention. "The Alpha's coming this way and my mate is going to introduce me around. Don't you dare ruin this."
Neither of them was bothering to perform anymore. Honestly, that was almost restful.
I said nothing — there's nothing to say to people who've stopped pretending — and moved to the next table.
By the time my tray was empty and I was heading back toward the kitchens, I'd gone somewhere flat and quiet inside myself. Which was exactly when I came around a pillar and nearly walked straight into a small, glittering cluster of people.
The Alpha. Elias. And a stranger in clothes so fashionable they looked painful to sit down in — foreign, important, the sort of guest you build an entire evening around.
I put my head down and walked faster.
Almost made it.
"Elowen?" Elias's voice, low and disbelieving. He'd caught my scent before he'd caught sight of me — the way mates always do — and I felt him turn even with my back to him. "You... you're here too?"
I didn't stop. Didn't answer. But I heard it in his voice: that thin, uncomfortable thread of guilt he hadn't managed to bury, and underneath it something that didn't dare say anything more.
I might have gotten past clean, if the Alpha hadn't been paying attention.
"Elowen?"
His voice was nothing like Elias's. No guilt in it at all — just startled, open delight, and it stopped me cold in a way three sneering strangers hadn't managed all night. Alistair actually stepped away from his precious foreign Elder to get a proper look at me, and I watched his face move from confusion into something warm.
"Gods, it really is you. You're back — why in the world didn't anyone send me word? I'd have—"
Then his eyes dropped. The tray under my arm. The plain dress. The rag still looped through my belt.
The warmth curdled into something else entirely.
"Why are you doing omega work?"
