Chapter 2 The Name My Father Buried

Emrys's POV

My hand is still pressed against my own chest when Odette snaps her fingers in front of my face.

"Emrys. Hello. Earth to fiancé."

I drop my hand fast, like she caught me doing something wrong, because that's exactly what it feels like. Whatever just happened- the burn under my ribs, the flash of silver water that wasn't a memory but felt like one- it's already fading, and I don't know how to explain something I don't understand myself.

"Sorry," I say. "Long day."

"You were staring at my sister."

It's not a question. Odette's voice has an edge to it now, the kind she only uses when she thinks something belongs to her and someone else is looking at it wrong.

"I wasn't staring at anyone," I say, which is a lie, and Odette knows it's a lie, and for once she doesn't push. She links her arm through mine and steers me toward the doors as if nothing happened at all, like I didn't just watch her sister go pale and grab the table like the floor was tilting under her.

I look back once. Rosalind isn't looking at me anymore. She's staring at her hands like she's never seen them before.

By the time I get home, I've almost convinced myself I imagined the whole thing. Almost.

Dinner is the same as always. My father at the head of the table, going over Combine numbers like the dining room is just another boardroom. My mother pretending to listen. Me, pushing food around a plate, still thinking about a name I said out loud in front of the whole school without meaning to.

"You seem distracted," my father says, not even looking up from his tablet.

"It's nothing."

"It's the Fenwick girl, isn't it?" He says it flat, like he's reading it off a report. "The one who collapsed."

My spine goes stiff. "How do you know about that already?"

"I know everything that happens on Combine property." He finally looks up, and his eyes are the same gray as mine, the same gray I see in the mirror every morning and have never once liked. "She's nothing to worry about, Emrys. A girl who can't shift. A liability her father is too soft to deal with properly. Focus on Odette. Focus on the merger. That's what matters."

Something in me pushes back before I can stop it.

"She said a name," I say. "When she collapsed. She called me Cassian."

The room goes very quiet.

My father sets his tablet down slowly, and for one second, one single second, something moves behind his eyes that looks almost like fear. Then it's gone, smoothed over so fast I'd have missed it if I wasn't already staring, already looking for it.

"That name means nothing," he says. "Old pack nonsense. Superstition. Don't repeat it, not to her, not to anyone."

"Why not?"

"Because I said so." His voice drops into the register he uses in boardrooms, the one that ends conversations whether I want them ended or not. "Rosalind Fenwick is nothing to worry about. Say it back to me."

I don't. I get up from the table and go to my room, because the words sit in my chest like a stone I swallowed wrong, and something about the way he flinched at a name I didn't even know I was going to say tells me he's lying. My father doesn't flinch. Not at market crashes, not at pack disputes, not at anything.

He flinched at Cassian.

I don't sleep well. I don't sleep at all, really, not at first; I lie there running the whole day back through my head, the burn in my chest, the look on Rosalind's face, my father's hand going still on the table. Somewhere around midnight I finally drift off, and that's when the dream comes back worse than it's ever been.

It's always the same shape. Moonlight on black water. Antlers cutting the dark like a crown made of knives. My hands, my hands, but not mine, bigger, clawed, wrong, closing around a throat that belongs to someone I love so much it feels like drowning just to look at her.

Except this time the dream doesn't stop where it always stops. This time I see her face clearly for the first time in three years of having this exact nightmare, and it isn't a stranger's face at all.

It's Rosalind's.

I wake up shouting, tangled in sheets soaked through with sweat, my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth. It takes me a full minute to remember where I am, that I'm seventeen, eighteen, that I'm Emrys Caldwell in my own bed in my own house, not some monster standing over black water with someone's life draining out between his fingers.

Then I look down at my arm, and every thought in my head goes silent at once.

Four long claw marks run down my forearm, deep enough to still be bleeding, deep enough to have soaked through the sheet beneath it. Real. Not imagined. Not part of the dream I just clawed my way out of.

My human hand did not make these marks.

I stare at them for a long time, waiting for my brain to offer some normal explanation, some story that makes sense: I scratched myself in my sleep, I caught it on something, anything. Nothing comes. There is nothing in this room sharp enough to leave four marks that clean, that deep, that perfectly shaped like claws from a wolf I have never once, not in eighteen years of trying, been able to fully shift into.

Downstairs, faintly, I hear my father's study door close at almost two in the morning, footsteps pacing back and forth across old wood like he hasn't slept either.

And through my open window, carried on wind that smells like rain and something colder underneath it, I hear a sound I have never heard on Combine property before in my life.

A wolf, howling somewhere near the Fenwick side of the grounds, in a voice that sounds almost exactly like a woman crying out a name.