His mate wore a mask

Remy

Remy

I hit the fire exit at full speed and the cold air of Ashford City swallows me whole.

My heels skid on wet pavement. I yank them off mid-stride, one then the other, and run in my bare feet toward the alley that cuts behind the club because the street is too open and too lit and I cannot be seen in a silk dress running from a building like a girl who just did something she cannot explain.

Which is exactly what I am.

My wolf is doing something she has never done before. She is not running with me .... she is pulling backward, straining like a dog on a leash toward the door I just came through, making a low sound in the back of my skull that feels less like distress and more like longing.

Stop it, I think at her. He is not ours. Nobody is ours.

She disagrees. Loudly.

I get to the end of the alley, press myself flat against the brick wall, and breathe.

He inhaled me.

That is the part I cannot outrun, even at full sprint. Wolves smell for information the way humans read .... instinctively, constantly, translating the world through scent into something that means safe or threat or mine. The pills I take kill my scent signal almost completely. I have been invisible that way for six months. A ghost. A boy who smells like nothing unusual.

Except he inhaled like he found something.

What did he find?

I push off the wall and start walking. Fast, purposeful, the way my father taught me to walk .... chest forward, no hesitation, take up the right amount of space and no more. Beta Harlan Dusk's one useful lesson. Everything else he ever taught me was about disappearing, but he taught me to walk like I had somewhere to be.

I have somewhere to be. My dormitory. My textbooks. Dreston 's economics paper that is due Thursday and that I will write under my own name and then copy his name to the top because that is the arrangement and the arrangement is all I have.

I pull my phone from the hoodie pocket I stuffed it in before the set.

Three texts from Sasha.

You actually did it lmaooo

How was the stage, little brother?

Don't forget you still owe me for this. Sleep well!

I put the phone away before I throw it into traffic.

The Silverpeak Pack mansion sits forty minutes outside Ashford City proper, up a winding road through pine forest so dense it eats the moonlight. I take the public bus .... three transfers, one hour total .... because I do not have a car and because Sasha's driver left the moment she was done with me and because this is my life.

I change on the bus. The dress goes into my bag. The hoodie goes back on. By the time I walk through the mansion's east service entrance .... I am Remy Dusk again. Cropped hair, formless sweatshirt, worn sneakers, nobody.

The mansion is quiet at this hour. Midnight, maybe just past. The Alpha's family keeps late hours but private ones .... Derrick Cole in his study, probably, his wife Marla upstairs with her insomnia and her face creams, Sasha definitely still awake somewhere gloating into her phone.

And Dreston .

I find out where Dreston is the same way I always do .... without trying.

He is in the library. Second floor, east wing, the one room in this mansion that was never renovated because Alpha Derrick does not read and therefore does not care about it. Dreston cares about it. He has cared about it since we were twelve and he dragged me in there to show me a book about werewolf battle strategy and I spent three hours explaining the actual tactical errors in chapter four while he stared at me with the specific expression of someone who has just realized their friend is smarter than they planned for.

We have been in this arrangement since then. He collects my intelligence. I collect .... nothing. I collected proximity. I collected the way he laughs at his own jokes before he finishes them. I collected every small ordinary thing like it was treasure because I was a fool.

I am not a fool anymore.

I am almost past the library door when it opens.

"Remy."

His voice. Of course.

I stop. Turn. Arrange my face into the expression I have been perfecting for six months .... neutral, slightly tired, mildly inconvenienced. The face of a boy who has been studying too late and wants to go to bed.

Dreston Cole in a doorway is an unfair thing to face at midnight. He is tall in the way that Alpha blood tends to produce .... not the sharp, still tallness of the man in the front row but a broader, warmer height, like a tree. Golden-brown hair pushed back carelessly.

He is looking at me with an expression I have learned to read like a weather pattern.

He wants something.

"I've been waiting," he says.

"For what?"

"The economics outline. I need the first draft by tomorrow night, not Thursday." He leans against the doorframe. "Professor Keane moved up the review."

I do not point out that he could write his own economics outline. I stopped pointing that out around month three of this arrangement, when I understood that pointing it out changed nothing and only made the silence between us colder.

"I'll have it by noon," I say.

He nods. Starts to pull back into the library. Then stops.

His eyes do the thing they have been doing for three weeks .... a small adjustment, like a camera trying to focus. He looks at me and then looks again, like something in the image is not resolving correctly.

"You okay?" he asks. "You look.... "

"I was studying at the city library. Long night." I hold his gaze. "Good night, Dreston ."

I walk away before he can finish his sentence.

I do not run. Running would tell him something is wrong.

But my hands, tucked inside my hoodie pocket, are shaking.

My room is on the third floor of the east wing, between the linen storage and a bathroom that only the domestic staff use.

I sit on the bed. I do not turn on the light.

I reach under the mattress and find the orange prescription bottle .... not prescription, actually, not from any doctor who exists on any record. Purchased three months after the rejection from a girl in the city who knew a girl who knew a chemist. Scent suppressants, she called them. For omegas who need to disappear. She had said it with a sympathy I was not prepared for and almost cried at, which would have been humiliating, so I paid her and left quickly.

I shake one pill out. Take it dry.

Then I sit in the dark and try very hard not to think about storm-grey eyes and the word you spoken like a period at the end of a sentence that has been going on for years.

My wolf makes that sound again.

He is looking for me, I think, not because I know it, but because my wolf knows it, and she has started sharing information whether I ask for it or not.

Let him look, I tell her.

I pull my laptop onto my lap and open Dreston 's economics file.

He will not find anything.