Chapter 2 — One Night, No Names

"You should be afraid of me," he said.

We were in the dark of a room near the top of the tower, a city's worth of light burning below the windows, his hand not quite touching my face — hovering, the way you hold a palm near a flame to test it.

"I used up all my fear earlier tonight," I told him. "Somebody took the last of it in front of three hundred people."

He didn't laugh. I was already learning he didn't, much. But something eased at the corner of his mouth, and from him that felt bigger than laughter from anyone else.

"You knelt to no one," he said. "Down there. The whole room went to the floor, and you sat there and told a king to enter a contest."

"I didn't know you were a king."

"Would it have changed anything?"

I thought about it honestly. That was the mistake. Honesty is how the night turned dangerous.

"No," I said. "I'm fresh out of things to lose. That tends to make a girl rude."

His thumb finally touched my cheekbone. Barely. And the gravity I'd felt at the bar pulled tight, and I understood the shape of the thing that scared me.

It wasn't him.

It was the want. My whole life I'd been told I was broken — a wolf with no wolf, a girl who couldn't feel the bonds everyone else lived by — and here, in the dark, something was reaching for him out of the center of me with both hands.

"This isn't fate," I said. Mostly to warn myself. "I had fate. Fate stood up in a white coat tonight and told a room full of people it was ashamed of me."

"No," he agreed. His voice had gone low and rough. "This isn't fate."

"Then what is it?"

"A choice," he said. "Which is the only thing fate can't take back."

We never said our names. That was the rule, unspoken, that we both kept. He was a wound that had walked into the same bar as mine, and for one night we were just the wounds, with no histories attached.

I will not give you the rest of it. Some things you keep.

I woke at the gray edge of dawn with the bed cold on his side.

No note. No name. No number. Exactly the deal we'd struck.

I told myself I was relieved. I was a practiced liar by then. I almost believed me.

I was gathering my mother's dress off the floor when my hand closed on something small and hard tangled in the sheets.

A cufflink. Heavy. Worked in dark metal so fine it looked wet in the light. A wolf — and over its head, fitted close, like it had grown there, a crown.

I didn't know the sigil then. I was a provincial girl from a status-broke pack; I'd never been near the houses that wore crowns over their wolves. But I knew enough to know that men who leave things like this in hotel beds are not men a girl like me walks away from clean.

I should have set it on the nightstand and left it his.

I put it in my coat pocket, against my chest, where it stayed. It is the only theft I have ever committed, and I have never once been sorry for it.

Mooncrest had until moonset to be rid of me, and I had three hours of dark left. So I drove back — the long road out of the capital and up into the hills, the same road I'd come down a lifetime ago that afternoon — for the only things I owned that mattered.

My mother's three books. A box of nothing. The wrist I kept pressing like it might come loose.

My father — Tomas — was waiting on the porch of the cottage they'd let us live in at the pack's ragged edge.

He looked like he'd aged ten years since the ceremony. He'd been crying. My father, who had taught me before I could read that an Ashwood does not let them see you bleed, had been sitting in the cold, crying, while his daughter was severed in front of the world.

"Don't," I said, before he could speak. "If you say you're sorry, I'll come apart, and I've worked very hard tonight not to."

"Aurora." He stood. His hands were shaking, and not from the cold. "There are things I should have told you. Things your mother made me swear. I kept the oath because I thought it would keep you safe." His voice cracked. "I was a coward, and I called it love."

A cold finger walked up my spine. "What things?"

He took my scarred wrist in both of his hands, gentle, like it was made of something that could break. His thumb pressed the white seam — the same place mine always goes.

"This wasn't an accident," he said. "And the fire that took your mother—"

His voice broke clean in half.

The night went very still around us. Somewhere down in the dark a dog barked once and gave up. And I knew, the way you know a door is about to open onto cold, that whatever he said next would split my life into a before and an after.

"Aurora." He pulled in a breath like a drowning man. "Your mother didn't die."

I have spent five years pretending I didn't hear him say it.

I heard him. I have heard him every night since.