A small wooden box.
She’d snuck it back into her room and when she’d opened the lid, a tinkling melody began to play. A small figurine wearing a pretty pink skirt sprang up, spinning along with the music.
There was a note in the box as well.
For my little pup. I’ll see you soon.
And even though she was young and certainly not privy to the ways of the world, Mireille knew that the male who’d visited the cabin the previous night was her father. And he’d left her a gift.
She’d hidden the note beneath her mattress, the box beneath her bed, and for weeks, months, years, expected him to return like he’d promised.
At night, alone in her bedroom, Mireille would open the box and mimic the small ballerina. Irina, she’d named her, after Irina Amiel, the legendary prima ballerina of the Imperial Ballet in Delos. A fact Mireille had learned from the books her mother insisted she study as her sole means of education.
Mireille would twirl around her room, pretending to be Irina, imagining that if she could maintain the spin for as long as the music played, somehow her father would know. He’d realize she was perfect and he would come back to rescue her from her mother’s suffocating clutches.
But he never did.
So Mireille bore it. Did everything Vivienne ever asked of her. Suppressed her feelings and dreams and lived a life of colorless drudgery, with her untrained dancing as her only outlet. Imagined the life she might have one day if her mother ever let her go.
Her wish came sooner, and with far more violence, than Mireille could’ve anticipated.
The day after Mireille turned twenty-one, two males had arrived at the cabin.
The instant Vivienne scented them prowling through the pines, she’d snarled at Mireille to stay inside, then burst through the door and shifted into her wolf.
Watching through the window, Mireille saw her mother—that proud, copper she-wolf so similar to her own—stare down the two enormous males, one gray and one black.
“Did you think you could hide from the pack forever?” the black wolf growled. “Give the child over, and we’ll leave.”
“Never,” Vivianne barked, launching for the gray wolf.
Despite her confused feelings about the woman who controlled her entire existence, Mireille couldn’t stand by and watch her mother get eaten alive. So she rushed from the cabin and called upon her own wolf.
The fight wasvicious.
It was the most alive Mireille had felt in years. Maybe ever.
Blood and fur flew as yips and snarls and howls rent the night, Vivienne fighting with a ferocity that Mireille had never witnessed. Mother and daughter pushed the two wolves further into the woods and finally chased them off.
“Psycho bitches,” the black wolf had growled over a torn shoulder as he and his companion fled. “You’re not worth the effort.”
Mireille and Vivienne limped back to the cabin, but before they even made it to the steps, Vivienne collapsed in the grass, shifting back into her humanoid form.
And revealing a sight Mireille would never forget for as long as she lived.
Her mother’s terrified silver eyes swirling madly, her mouth opening and closing. And where her neck should have been, nothing but a gaping, meaty wound. Mireille was amazed her mother had made it through the fight, let alone back to the cabin. Streams of blood pulsated from the torn skin and muscleas Vivienne emitted watery gasps, trying to catch breaths that would never again fill her lungs.
Mireille shifted as well, wincing at the deep gash on her right forearm. She dimly recalled the gray wolf’s jaws sinking into her own wolf’s leg and tearing out a chunk of flesh.
She crashed to her knees, grasping her mother’s hand. It was all she could do. The wound was far too aggressive for even a Fae’s healing abilities to fix.
Vivienne gripped Mireille’s hand, pulling her closer with the last bit of strength in her failing body, and wheezed, “Your…father…”
She never finished her confession. Life drained from her eyes, her limbs slackening, and Mireille knew she was gone.
Vivienne would have been proud of the stoic calm that overtook Mireille as she sat there, bathed in moonlight, not shedding a single tear despite the complicated grief that froze her in place for hours. Her mother had died protecting her, a final act of love and sacrifice. But she’d also died protecting her own secrets. Mireille was simultaneously furious and heartbroken. Vivienne may not have been kind, but she was the only companionship Mireille had ever known.
She buried her mother at sunrise in the field behind their cabin.
