Chapter 4

Eve's POV

Victor stood at the top of the stone steps, one hand loose at his side, still travel-worn, and none of it diminished him at all.

My foster brother.

Silverleaf Pack's future Alpha, the one everyone already treated like he'd inherited the title years ago.

He wasn't looking at Vera.

He was looking at me, and not the way you look at a foster sister you haven't seen in a year.

His gaze moved over me slowly, the way a hand moves across a surface checking for a crack — my face first, then something lower, catching for half a second on the collar I'd pulled too high, then settling at the line of my hair where it fell over the back of my neck.

Like he was confirming something.

My body did the thing it always did around him, some old reflex I'd never managed to name, a tightening low in the stomach that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a night I'd spent a year telling myself I'd stopped remembering.

I remembered it anyway. Just a flash. His hand. A sentence he'd started and never finished.

I pushed it down before it could finish forming.

"Put away the murderous intent," he said. Even, quiet, not a request. "Come in."

Vera straightened before she'd decided to, her whole body doing it — the automatic compression of a lower wolf under a higher one — and I watched her smooth it over and fold herself back into the composed daughter of the house.

She moved past me toward the door, then cut sideways at the last second, two quick steps that brought her close enough that her voice dropped under everything else.

"You should think carefully about what you're going to tell him," she said. Light. Almost bored, like she was remarking on the weather. "About Renault, I mean. My brother's back now."

She didn't wait for a response.

She was already through the door, gone, leaving the sentence hanging in the air behind her where only I could feel it land.

I took three seconds. Then I went in.

The hall smelled like home, and I'd never once trusted that smell — it had been engineered to mean belonging, and it worked on everyone but me.

I stood at the edge of the room, and nobody told me to come closer and nobody told me to leave.

That was the arrangement, four years of it.

From the pieces of conversation moving around the table I understood the shape of the evening: Victor was home to take his father's place, to be formally installed as Alpha of Silverleaf.

He was staying, permanently, on this land, in this house.

And for the first time all evening, some small, cowardly part of me was almost grateful for Renault's invitation to move in.

Ella found me herself.

"Eve."

She lifted one hand and beckoned me across, and when I sat down beside her, the tightness in my chest dropped half a register, the way it only ever did around her.

She was the one person in this house — in the entire wolf world — who had ever looked at me like a person instead of a problem someone had abandoned on the doorstep.

She asked if I was eating enough at the estate, if the cold had gotten to me on the road over, and then her fingers brushed my forearm for just a second and her voice went lower.

"Any progress? Between you and Renault?"

I opened my mouth. I almost said it — he asked me to move in, except he didn't ask, he decided, and I don't know how to tell you that in a way that doesn't sound like exactly what it is.

It was right there, halfway up my throat, heavy and impossible to dress up, because she was the only one I ever wanted to tell the truth to.

"Mom." Vera's voice came from across the table, mild, almost conversational. "Why would you ask that?"

Ella looked up.

"You know what he calls her."

Vera wasn't performing cruelty this time, and that was somehow worse.

She said it the way you state something everyone at the table already understood, a clarification instead of an attack.

"A year. And he still calls her his companion."

A small pause, unhurried.

"No mark. No bond. No name that means anything. He tells people she's something different to come home to. A novelty."

She let it settle.

"Novelties get boring, Mom. Don't get attached to the idea that this ends in anything."

The table went quiet.

I didn't answer either.

I looked down at the table, at the grain of the wood, at the edge of my own knuckle, and the silence became its own kind of admission.

"Eve." Victor's voice.

I looked up.

Victor didn't look away from me.

"A year," he said, as though confirming a figure against a ledger he kept somewhere behind his eyes. "Since I left."

"Victor," Ella said quietly.

He didn't acknowledge it.

He leaned forward, just slightly, just enough to make the distance between us feel deliberately chosen.

"So tell me, Eve."

His voice stayed level, almost gentle, which was the most frightening thing about it.

"Why are you with him?"

Not how it happened. Why.

And I had no answer I could say out loud, because the true one lived somewhere I never let anyone near.

So I said nothing, and the silence stretched, and the whole table waited, and my not-answering became the answer.

Victor watched me hold it in.

Something moved behind his eyes.

Then his gaze dropped again, to my collar, to the line of my hair where it lay over the back of my neck, the place I'd been careful to keep covered all day.

"And," he said, very quietly, "what happened to your neck?"