Chapter 6

Elowen

I couldn't make myself look up at him.

Not because I was afraid of him. I'd never once been afraid of him — not through years of training under his own hand, not the day he looked at thirteen-year-old me and told the whole pack I'd be running his war council someday.

That was the problem. His voice still carried every ounce of that old expectation, completely undimmed, like the last three years simply hadn't happened. And I had nothing to put back into his hands except a tray and an apron.

"Because I need work," I said, to the floor, to his boots, to anywhere that wasn't his face. "I need money. I need to feed myself. And my grandmother."

"No — no, that isn't right." He actually laughed, like I'd told a joke he hadn't caught the shape of yet. "Your father is my Beta. Your mother's family has half this village in their pocket. You need to feed yourself?" A pause, and his voice gentled in a way that was somehow worse. "Elowen, I know those three years were hard. But there's no reason to punish yourself by taking work like—"

He didn't get to finish.

Footsteps, hurried, from behind me. Three of them.

"Alpha!" My father arrived at a near-jog, my mother half a step behind with a smile already fixed in place, brittle as spun glass. "There you are — we thought we heard your voice from across the hall!"

"Yes — Alistair, what a surprise finding you here." My mother swept in, beaming.

"What are we all talking about?" Her eyes caught mine for half a second — caught the look on my face — and didn't so much as flinch. "Oh, is it Elowen's little job? Ha. You've completely misunderstood, I'm afraid. Three years of hard labour down in that hollow, the poor thing simply can't sit still anymore. It's a hobby. Keeping busy. Nothing serious at all."

"A hobby," Alistair repeated. Flat.

"No—" My voice came out sharper than I intended. "I'm not—"

"It's roleplay, really," Celeste added brightly, sliding in beside our mother like she'd rehearsed the line in a mirror. "It's a sort of game with her. As if our family would ever let her want for money — can you imagine?"

The Alpha went quiet.

Not confused-quiet. A different kind entirely — the kind that comes from a man running numbers in his head and not liking the sum. His eyes moved once, slow, from my father's forced smile to my mother's brittle one to my sister's bright, practiced one.

Something in his face shut like a door.

He didn't call any of them liars. He didn't have to.

"I don't particularly care what game this family is playing." His voice stayed perfectly level, but something underneath it had gone to iron. "Here's what I know. Whatever her wolf is now, whatever that place took out of her — the effort she gave me, the talent she had, I have never seen its equal. Not before her. Not since." He looked at me directly. "If she needs money, she'll have work. Real work. Something worthy of her."

Warmth went through me so suddenly it was embarrassing. "You — really?"

"Work?" My mother's laugh cracked at the edges. "Alpha, forgive me, but — she doesn't actually know how to do anything—"

"She's right, sadly." Celeste shook her head with theatrical regret. "Three years down there and she's fit for chores at best. Nothing decent, nothing skilled." Then, sweetly: "You weren't going to hand her another scrubbing job, were you?"

I turned on her, three years of swallowed rage finally locating a target with a name on it—

The crash behind us cracked through the hall like a struck bell.

Every head turned.

The Elder — the Alpha's precious guest from the capital — had gone rigid on the floor, back arched off the marble, and the veins along his throat were rising, thickening, turning a black-purple so wrong it didn't look like a color a living body should be able to produce.

"No — no, no." Alistair's voice cracked with genuine panic. "That's Elder Soren from the capital. That is a personal friend of the Alpha King. Somebody get a healer!"

Elias reached him first, dropped to a knee, and recoiled. "He's stiff — gods, his whole body's locked up—" He was shouting before he'd finished standing. "Healers! Now!"

Three of them converged in seconds. I watched all three faces fall apart in real time.

"Gods below." The first one's hands shook as she pulled his collar back. "This is Silverblood Powder. Black-market. This is supposed to be lost—"

"It devours the heart-vein of high-ranked wolves specifically." The second's voice was climbing toward hysteria. "His wolf-core is dissolving as we speak. Any healing magic that touches him becomes fuel for it — the second magic makes contact, he detonates. Three seconds. Maybe less."

"Forget treating him." The third actually took a step back from the body. "We need to get the corpse out of this hall before—"

"Fuck!" Alistair's roar rattled the chandeliers. "Are you standing there telling me he's already dead? If he dies at my table, the King burns this pack to the ground! Do something!"

The hall dissolved. Guests shrieking back from the spreading black stain crawling up the Elder's throat. Healers shouting over each other. Somebody sobbing, somewhere, that this was supposed to be a celebration.

One of the healers finally produced a small glass vial from inside his robes, hands trembling too hard to read his own label, and moved it toward the dying man's mouth.

And I stood at the edge of all of it with an empty tray under my arm, looking down at a convulsing body surrounded by robed experts who had no idea what they were looking at.

And felt nothing like fear.

It was almost funny, in the same dark way the sneering had been funny. Blackened veins. A wolf-core in meltdown. A poison that punishes magic. Set that beside what came through the Hollow's doors at two in the morning, and this was a training case. First week. The kind you hand a new apprentice to see whether they faint.

Three treatments unspooled in my head before I'd decided to think about it at all.

Then my eyes landed on the vial in the healer's shaking grip. I read the label from six feet away.

Every one of those three plans went cold and quiet, replaced by one single screaming certainty.

"Wait."

The word tore out of me before I'd chosen to say it. The entire room turned.

"Elowen, don't you dare—" My mother's voice went shrill with fury. "That is a guest even the Alpha can't afford to offend, and you want to make a scene? Don't you dare embarrass this family further—"

"Did scrubbing tincture jars in that hollow finally give you hallucinations?" Celeste's laugh could have drawn blood. "Sit down before you make it worse."

I didn't know where the certainty was coming from. Only that it filled me completely, the way it used to fill me down there when a chest stopped moving and there was no time left to be unsure of anything.

Maybe the crisis had simply dropped me back into that room, that table, those hours. Or maybe it was Nana, last night, turning her cup in her hands: from where I'm sitting, that doesn't sound so different from being a healer.

Three years of standing in rooms exactly like this one. Every single day.

I stepped past my mother without looking at her, and put my eyes on the healer holding that vial.

"If you put a single drop of that in his mouth," I said, and my voice came out steady enough that his hand actually froze mid-air, "he doesn't have three seconds. He has none."

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