Chapter 2

Eve's POV

I woke up alone.

The sheets on Renault's side had gone cold hours ago.

That was the whole of it, really: he decided the shape of my life at midnight and was gone by first light, and the deciding cost him nothing, and the leaving cost him less.

My hand found the back of my neck before I was fully awake, fingers pressing down over the broken skin until the sting cut through the last of the sleep.

It radiated out toward my shoulders, sharp and specific, a small punishment I couldn't stop pressing on.

If I were a female wolf, that bite would've meant something.

A bond. A mark.

Proof that I belonged to someone, that someone had chosen me in a way the Moon Goddess herself recognized.

But I wasn't. I was human.

All it had done was leave a wound I'd be pulling my collar over for the next week, and a scent worked so deep into my skin that it wouldn't fade before I reached Silverleaf.

I couldn't smell it myself — that was the cruel part, the human part.

But every wolf I passed today would catch it the moment I came within range, would read the whole story off me before I'd said a word, and there was nothing I could do about it.

No scrubbing, no perfume, no amount of time in the shower would lift it in the hours I had.

I would simply have to carry him back into Silverleaf on my skin and let them all smell it.

I got dressed, pulled my hair carefully over the back of my neck, and went down.

The younger maid was in the corridor with a tray, and she caught my scent before she caught sight of me.

Her nostrils flared, her gaze dropped to my throat where the collar didn't quite reach, and then her eyes slid off me entirely, fixed on the middle distance as she stepped aside to let me pass.

She said nothing. She didn't have to. In a house full of wolves, the silence did all the work a slur would have done and left cleaner hands doing it.

My stomach turned over, slow and heavy.

So I did the only thing I could do, which was leave.

The enchanted car took twenty minutes to arrive, and the driver's expression changed the instant I gave the address.

His eyes climbed to the mirror, eyebrows with them.

"Silverleaf? That's cross-pack." A short, humorless laugh. "A human, running between pack grounds like it's a day trip. You have any idea what the checkpoint does to that route?"

"Triple the fare," I said quietly. "Please."

He exhaled through his nose, the exhale of a man who had already decided and wanted me to know he resented it, and pulled out onto the main road.

I watched Obsidian Estate shrink in the rear window until the trees swallowed it.

The drive was long, and long drives were dangerous.

My mind went where it always went when I stopped keeping a hand on it.

There'd been a village once, on the edge of the forest, and parents who braided my hair too tight and covered it with a scarf and never once explained why.

I didn't find out until the fire took them when I was twelve.

After that, the silver hair and the green eyes were suddenly everyone's business and nobody's welcome.

To ordinary people, it looked like something out of a curse.

There was no corner of that world with room in it for a face like mine.

Twelve to fourteen, just me, just staying alive.

And then I'd met him.

I shut my eyes hard, but it didn't matter.

The image was already there, overlaying itself on the memory of Renault's face the way it always did when I wasn't careful.

The way his head tilted when he was thinking.

The line of his jaw when he smiled. The particular softness in his expression when he looked at me like I wasn't something broken.

I opened my eyes.

Focused on the road outside, the buildings blurring past.

I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and made myself breathe. In through the nose, out slow, the way you do when you're trying to convince your body that everything is fine.

It took three tries before my chest stopped feeling like something was sitting on it.

But my eyes were already wet, and blinking didn't help.

The car slowed as we reached the edge of Silverleaf territory, and something tightened under my ribs.

I paid the driver, thanked him quietly, and stepped out into the courtyard.

I made it three steps before I heard her voice.

"Well, well. Look who finally remembered where she lives."

Vera stood near the side entrance with two of the house staff flanking her, arms crossed, mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.

The maids were already smirking, the way people smirk when they've been waiting a while for the entertainment to arrive.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps and kept my face pleasant, kept my hands loose at my sides, because the alternative had never once made things better.

"Welcome home, sister," she said softly.

Then she tilted her head, and her nostrils flared, and I watched her put it together the same way the maid at Obsidian had, the same way every wolf in my life put it together the moment I walked into a room.

"Your scent," Vera said, wrinkling her nose as if she'd walked into something rotten. "It's honestly offensive."