Her words hang between us, meant to reassure, but the air in the cabin has grown too thick to breathe. The edges of the room seem to close in until I feel like I’m being pressed in from all sides. Trapped.
I stand up, my chair scratching against the rough wood floors.
The numbness shifts. Tightens. Becomes something else entirely.
I take a step back, and Rhosyn’s hand catches my arm before I can turn away. Her hold is light, meant to slow me, not keep me.
I can’t stay here.
“I just—” My throat burns. “I need air.”
She starts to say something, but I don’t have it in me to hear anything else.
He should have told me. I shouldn’t have had to find out this way.
My boots scrape against the warped floorboards as I take another step back. The pattern in the wood tilts, swims. I look at Rhosyn, my head jerking in a small, stiff shake. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought…” My breath catches. “I thought we were friends.”
If I could still feel my body, I think this might hurt as much as Rennick’s deception—or omission. Whatever you want to call it. But my mind’s too far gone to tell the difference anymore.
“Noa,” she pleads, her green eyes turning glossy. “I am your friend. But Canaan and Rennick said?—”
My hand lifts, not to silence her, but to beg her to stop.
I can’t listen to her talk about this so-called plan again. Not when I’m realizing I’ve already heard it before. From both of them. First it was Canaan, standing in my bedroom back in Ashvale, hinting at some secret plan for Talis. He’d used it to convince me to go home with them. Then Rennick, when I argued about staying under his roof—about sharing a house with a man still promised to another woman—he’d told me Talis was handled. But now I’m wondering if it was all nothing more than promises meant to pacify me, to keep me compliant.
Were those just more pretty words?
I turn away from the table and start toward the dim hallway that leads to the healer room. There’s a side exit there. If I take it, I can slip out without drawing the attention of the women on the porch. I understand Zora well enough now to know she’ll never let me leave quietly.
Noa?Wait!Siggy’s panicked voice cuts through my mind, making my head snap in her direction.Let me come with you.
I shake my head hard, my refusal resolute. “Don’t follow me, Siggy.”
The bite in my tone lands harder than I mean it to, and the hurt that flashes across her face guts me. She doesn’t deserve that. Not from me.Neverfrom me. I’ll get on my knees and beg her forgiveness later—once I can breathe again. Once I can feel something other than this hollow ache eating through me.
I find the side exit on muscle memory alone and push through the door, stumbling into the cold. This time when the cold breeze slams into me, I don’t feel it.
I don’t really knowwhere I’m going when I leave the healer’s cabin.
My feet just start moving, and I let them. I weave between trees, my boots scuffing through layers of brittle leaves. Small streams cut between rocks like old scars, the water catching the gray light of frigid afternoon, as I step over them clumsily. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind an old map unfurls. I’ve walked this route before—years ago, when I was smaller. Unbroken. That faint echo of memory steers me now, because the rest of me is still offline and hollow.
The numbness has set in fully, thick and heavy. It sits where feeling should be, a dull pressure in my chest that neither burnsnor reduces its hold. It’s not a new sensation. It’s the same wound Rennick gave me when he rejected me, but learning about this celebration for his betrothal has torn it open again. I’d started to believe we were finding our way forward, that maybe there was a version of us that could exist where it didn’t cause me pain.
Now, it feels like the ground’s been pulled out from under me all over again.
The toe of my leather boot catches on a downed log, and I stumble, hands jerking out, looking for something resembling balance. I just barely manage to find some. The near fall sends a dull jolt up my legs, and for a second, that flicker of physical discomfort is almost welcome. Then it fades. I lower myself onto the log, elbows braced on my knees, fingers threaded in my hair. Each breath comes out as a thin cloud of white, vanishing into the cold air before me.
I lose track of time sitting there, running every look, every touch, every promise through my head until they blur together. The part of me that still believes in him—the part that hears my wolf howling that he’d never mean to hurt us again—wages a battle against the rest of me. The part whose skepticism was carved from survival. Rhosyn’s faith in him should comfort me, but it doesn’t.
Giving my blind trust feels like voluntarily walking barefoot through broken glass and expecting it to not cut me.
A soft sound pulls me out of my spiral. The crack of a branch. My head jerks up, my pulse stumbling as I search my surroundings.
Then I see her.
She stands between two trees, her body half-swallowed by shadow. Dark-brown-and-black fur clings to her in rough patches, and her eyes—Goddess, her eyes—gleam with a metallic sheen that’s unnatural. It’s the kind of glow that comes when themind starts to slip, when instinct replaces humanity. She’s close to losing herself. Feral.
“Juno,” I breathe.
