"Do you?" Viktor tilted his head. "Because I don't think you understand what that means. In this world, being his means being protected. But it also means being hunted. Everyone who wants to hurt him will look for you first."
"I've been hunted before."
"By coyotes and foxes. Not by wolves."
He got back in the car and drove away. I stood on the sidewalk with the towel in my hands, watching the taillights disappear around the corner.
The wolves are coming, I thought.
But so am I.
Upstairs, I stripped off my clothes and stood under the shower until the water ran cold. The blood swirled down the drain—Mikhail's blood, not mine—and I watched it go, thinking about how easy it was to wash away the evidence of violence.
But not the memory. Never the memory.
I dried off and put on clean clothes—sweatpants, a sweatshirt, the things I wore when I wanted to feel small andsafe. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and I thought about Aleksander's hand on my face.
For me.
I thought about Gabriel's kiss in the snow. Nathan's finger on my collarbone.
And me, caught in the middle, trying to survive.
But surviving wasn't enough anymore.
I wanted something else. Something I didn't have a name for.
I closed my eyes and slept without dreaming.
When I woke, the sun was high, and my phone was buzzing with a text from an unknown number.
Dinner tonight. 7 pm. Don't be late.
I didn't ask who it was. I already knew.
11
Gabriel's Confession
Gabriel
The greenhouse was my mother's first, and then it was no one's, and now it is hers without her knowing it.
I found her here three hours ago, curled into one of the wicker chairs with a textbook spread across her knees. The book is old—veterinary pharmacology, the pages soft and yellowed, the spine cracked from years of use. She told me once that she'd bought it at a library sale for fifty cents, back when she still believed she'd need it. Now she reads it the way other people read novels. For comfort. For escape. For the shape of a future that slipped through her fingers.
She didn't hear me come in. Her lips moved as she read, silent words forming and dissolving, and the afternoon light fell through the glass ceiling in golden shafts, catching the dust motes that drifted around her like snow. The orchids bloomedbehind her—my mother's orchids, still alive after all these years, still reaching toward the light like they hadn't noticed she was gone.
I stood in the doorway and watched her for longer than I should have.
That's become a habit. Watching her. I did it first through the window of the diner, sitting in my car with the engine off and the cold seeping through my jacket. I told myself I was watching my father. I told myself I was trying to understand what he saw in her. But that was a lie, and I knew it even then.
I was watching her because I couldn't look away.
She has a way of existing that makes the world feel less sharp. Less dangerous. When I'm near her, the pressure in my chest eases—the constant, low-grade panic that comes from being a Mire, from carrying a name that means something terrible. She doesn't ask me to be anything other than what I am. She doesn't flinch when I talk about anatomy lab or the cadavers I've cut open or the way the dead smell like nothing else on earth. She just listens. The way she listened to my father. The way she listens to everyone who bleeds in her presence.
I didn't want to startle her. I knocked on the doorframe—soft, two raps—and she looked up.
"Gabriel." Her face changed when she saw me. Not the polite smile she gives the waitstaff at the diner, not the careful blankness she wears around my father. Something real. Something that made my heart beat faster.
