Page 17

Tonight, the quiet was louder.

She filled a plate. Stew, bread, a glass of water. She kept her eyes on the food, on her hands, on the tray. She walked toward the back corner.

A woman at the third table leaned toward the woman beside her. Sloane didn’t hear the words. She heard the pitch, the murmur, the specific frequency of people talking about you while you were still in the room. She kept walking.

She sat. She ate. The stew was too hot, burning the roof of her mouth, and she welcomed it because the burn occupied space that would otherwise have filled with the awareness of being watched. She could feel the room’s attention on her skin, not hostile, not kind, but curious. The pack had watched her fall two years ago. Now they were watching to see what the magic’s decision would turn her into.

She was halfway through the bread when she looked up.

Olivia Hale was across the hall, three tables away, seated beside Viktor with a glass in her hand. She was looking directly at Sloane. Not with hostility, though not quite with warmth. The look was level, steady, the kind of look that took measurements without announcing what it found.

Sloane held it. She didn’t know why. Every instinct she’d built since childhood told her to drop her gaze, to make herself small, to offer the back of her neck in submission. She held it because dropping it felt like losing, and she was so tired of losing.

Olivia’s chin dipped a fraction, not quite a nod but close enough. Then she looked away, back to Viktor, her hand settling on the table beside his, and the moment was over.

Sloane’s throat ached beneath the high collar. She ate three more bites. Put the bread down, stood, and walked out.

The corridor was empty. Her boots echoed on the stone floor as she climbed the stairs to the second level. The bond hummed. Chris was in the building. Not close, not on this floor, but here, inside the same walls, breathing the same air. Her wolf pressed toward the sensation, a pull behind her ribs that wanted her to turn left instead of right, to follow the thread to wherever he was.

She turned right. Walked to unit fourteen. Put her hand on the door handle.

Stopped.

The door was closed. She’d left it closed. But the smell that reached her through the gap between door and frame was wrong. Faint, nearly gone, buried beneath the compound’s baseline of wood polish, stone, cooking smells from the kitchen two floors down.

Tobacco.

Her hand dropped from the handle. Her body went still with a precision she hadn’t asked for, every muscle locking into place, her lungs holding mid-breath. The hallway stretched in both directions, empty, lit by the overhead fixtures that hummed with a low electrical drone.

She stood there for fifteen seconds. Then she opened the door.

The room was empty. The bed was made. Her bag sat where she’d left it. The wardrobe was closed. The desk was clean.

The note was on the pillow.

White paper, folded once. No envelope. She could see the handwriting through the fold, the heavy downward strokes, the way the letters leaned left. She knew the handwriting the way she knew the sound of her own breathing.

She crossed the room in four steps. Picked it up. Unfolded it.

You moved. That’s fine. I know where you are.

You’ve been talking. That’s less fine.

The boy who broke my door won’t always be close enough to help. You know that.

I told you I’d come back. I don’t break promises, sweetheart.

Her hands were steady. She read it twice, folded it, put it in her back pocket. She checked the window, found it locked. She checked the wardrobe, the bathroom, the space beneath the bed. She checked the lock on the door and found it intact. No scratches on the mechanism. No forced entry.

He’d walked into the inner compound. Through the wards, past the patrol routes, into a building full of wolves, and put a piece of paper on her pillow. Then he’d walked back out.

She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands were still steady. That was the thing about fear that had lived inside you long enough to calcify: it didn’t make you shake. It made you still. It made you careful. It turned your body into a house with every window shuttered, every door locked from the inside, everything valuable pushed into the smallest room and the key swallowed.

She could tell someone. She could walk down the corridor, find Chris, hand him the note, watch his face change the way it had changed in the cottage when he’d seen the bruises on her throat. She could go to Kahn or Viktor. She could say he was inside the compound, he was in my room, he knows I’ve talked.

The words formed in her mind with perfect clarity.

She didn’t move.