After dinner, I catch Wyatt in the hall. He’s wiping soup from his shirt, but there’s a real smile on his face.
“She’s going to destroy us,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice down.
I nod, watching as Emery disappears into the kitchen with a stack of plates. “Yeah,” I say. “She is.”
Wyatt claps me on the back. “Better to lose to someone who deserves it.”
I don’t answer. I’m still not sure I believe it.
But as I stand there, listening to the quiet clatter of dishes and the faintest echo of laughter, I realize something’s shifted. The house feels different. Lighter.
I retreat to the study and pull the door shut behind me. The walls here are lined with books, and the only light is the honey glow of a desk lamp. I sit at the old oak desk, hands folded, and stare at the grain in the wood until the room stops spinning.
There’s a blank sheet of paper in front of me. I grab a pen, mostly out of habit, and start to write a list. It’s not names, or plans, or strategies. It’s just the things I know for sure.
1. Emery Grey is not going anywhere.
2. The pack is doomed to repeat our mistakes with Charlotte unless something changes.
3. I am not afraid of her, but I might be afraid of what happens if I let her win.
I stare at the list until the ink bleeds into the paper, spreading out like veins.
For the first time in months, I don’t know what comes next. It’s messy, imprecise, like Emery’s laugh or the way her hands move when she gets going. My head tells me to run the numbers, calculate the risks. My gut says she’s the only variable that matters now.
I put down the pen, half expecting the universe to snap back to order. But the room just gets quieter, the shadows from the lamp longer and softer. There’s a restlessness under my skin, something I can’t solve with work or whiskey or a sharp word.The absence of strategy feels like standing on a frozen lake in spring, every step a question.
I turn out the light and head for bed, trying to ignore the way every step feels like falling.
Falling forher.
CHAPTER 16
Bastion
It’s beenfour days since the car crash and three since the Council’s PR machine blitzed the city with stories about my “heroic recovery” and “resilience in the face of adversity.” It’s also been two days since Wyatt caught me using a fork as a backscratcher and ratted me out to every pack group chat in the tri-state area.
My arm is healing, sort of. My face looks like I got into a fistfight with a brick wall and the wall won. The only upside is that I’m confined to bed rest, which means I have an actual reason to ignore calls from my grandfather and the racing crew and everyone else who expects me to function at peak alpha at all hours.
The downside: I am going insane.
The walls of my bedroom used to be the only place I could breathe. The windows are triple-paned, the soundproofing’s pro, and I spent an entire summer convincing the house manager to get the ceiling painted a shade of blue so deep it feels like night, even at noon. There’s a big TV, a small fridge, and a king bed that could comfortably sleep four grown adults.
But after four days, the air is heavy. The cast on my arm itches like someone injected it with fire ants. I can smell thefaint tinge of bleach from the cleaning crew and the persistent, impossible sweetness of Emery’s natural omega scent.
Even when she’s not in the room, her scent lingers. She’s been coming in once every few hours to “check on me,” which is code for “make sure I haven’t died or started a fire or both.” Sometimes she brings food, sometimes painkillers, sometimes a sketchbook or a half-done Rubik’s cube. The first time she came in, she brought a balloon animal shaped like a wolf with one ear bitten off. She didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask.
This time, I hear her before I see her. The soft whump of her sneakers on the carpet, the click of her phone as she types something out—probably a text to Eloise, or a passive-aggressive meme about invalids. She doesn’t knock. She just comes in, her arms loaded with three containers and a glass pitcher of something the color of battery acid.
I prop myself up on one elbow and ignore the throb in my ribs. “What’s on the menu, Grey? More hospital-grade Jell-O, or did you decide to poison me?”
She doesn’t look up from her phone. “I was going to make you eggs, but I heard you threw up last time they tried to feed you protein. So, yeah. Jell-O. Sorry to disappoint.”
She sets the containers on the bed with a gentlethunkand finally looks at me. Her hair’s in two braids today, blue bleeding to purple, and she’s wearing a t-shirt with an abstract wolf face that’s either avant-garde or a printer error. Her eyes scan the room and take in the state of me—shirtless, one arm in a sling, face still swollen—and she smirks.
“You look like shit, Silverwood,” she says. “But, like, in a conceptual-art way.”
I bare my teeth, mock-feral. “I could say the same about your color choices.”
