The Debt He Owed My Wolf

Chapter 2

"She doesn't sit at my table," Corwin says slowly, drawing the words out like he's savoring them, "because she doesn't deserve to."

I want to disappear into the floorboards. Every guest at that table is staring now, forks frozen halfway to open mouths, wine glasses forgotten mid-pour. I can feel the weight of a dozen strangers' curiosity pressing against my skin, and it's worse, somehow, than the usual cruelty. Strangers haven't decided what to think of me yet. For one terrible second, there's a version of tonight where they simply see a tired girl who cut her arm on a broken plate.

That version dies fast.

"She's the reason our parents are dead," Corwin continues, and there's a satisfaction curling through his voice that makes my stomach turn like he's been waiting years for an audience important enough to deserve the story. "Six years old, and she poisoned their food. So no, Alpha Kade, she doesn't sit with family. She serves it."

I brace for the laugh. It always comes, the little huff of disbelief, the sideways glance, the way people's eyes slide over me afterward like I'm something spoiled left out too long in the sun. I've heard this story recited a hundred times by a hundred different mouths, and it always ends exactly the same way: with me standing very still, waiting for it to be over.

Kade doesn't laugh.

His jaw tightens, and something shifts behind those crimson eyes that I can't name, something colder and more focused than anger. He looks at me again, longer this time, like he's recalculating everything he thought he understood about this house the moment he crossed its threshold.

"Six years old," he repeats, very quietly.

"She knows what she did," Corwin says.

"I know what I'm being told I did," I say, before I can stop the words from leaving my mouth.

They hang in the air like smoke. I feel Selene's glare land on me like an open-handed slap. Nobody speaks unless spoken to at this table (that rule has been carved into me since before I could read) and I've broken it twice tonight already, in front of the very worst possible audience.

"Get back to the kitchen," Corwin snaps, some of his careful polish finally cracking loose.

I go. My legs carry me faster than I mean them to, past Tessa waiting wide-eyed just inside the doorway, and I pull her further back into the pantry where neither of us will be seen for the rest of the night. My arm throbs where the plate cut it, sharp and insistent under the makeshift pressure of my sleeve, but I don't dare ask anyone for something to clean it with. Asking for things has never once gone well for me. Silence is safer. Silence has always been safer.

The dinner drags on without me. I sit on an overturned crate in the pantry with Tessa curled against my side, listening to the muffled rise and fall of voices through the wall, trying to guess from tone alone whether the night is going well or badly for my brother. I hear it end sometime after midnight, chairs scraping back across the floor, Corwin's booming, false laughter at something Kade says in return, the front door finally closing on the last of the guests.

I wait until the house goes fully quiet before I risk slipping out the back door toward the kennels, where I keep a small tin of salve hidden behind a loose board, the only medicine I've ever managed to keep hidden from anyone else's hands. The night air is sharp and cold against my face, a relief after hours spent sweating through the kitchen. Somewhere across the yard, one of the hounds huffs softly in its sleep.

I'm halfway through wrapping my arm in the dark, working mostly by feel, when a shadow shifts at the mouth of the kennel row.

I nearly drop the tin. "You shouldn't be out here alone at night, Alpha."

"No," he agrees, stepping closer, "but it's about to be my territory too, one way or another." He crouches down across from me, close enough now that I can make out the tension still lingering in his jaw even in the dark. "Let me see your arm."

"It's fine."

"That's not what I asked."

I hesitate, exhaustion finally outweighing whatever instinct usually keeps me from obeying strangers, and hold my arm out toward him. His fingers are careful as he turns it toward the moonlight, tracing the edge of the fresh cut and then further up, where my sleeve has ridden loose enough to reveal the pale line of an old scar underneath it, one I'd forgotten was even visible tonight.

His whole body goes very still.

"How many of these do you have?" he asks, quiet in a way that somehow carries more weight than shouting would.

"I don't count anymore." It's the most honest thing I've said all night, and I have no idea why it comes so easily to a stranger I met only three hours ago, in a house full of people I've known my entire life and told nothing to.

"Your brother said you poisoned your parents."

"That's what everyone says."

"That's not what I asked either." His eyes lift to mine, steady, unblinking, patient in a way nobody has ever been with me before. "I asked what actually happened. Not what you've been told to repeat until it stopped sounding like a story."

Something in his voice: flat, careful, like he already suspects the whole tale doesn't hold together the way everyone insists it does, makes my throat tighten in a way I don't fully understand.

"I was six," I whisper. "I don't remember most of it. I remember making lemonade. I remember everyone screaming after. That's all anyone ever let me keep of that day. Every other piece of it belongs to somebody else's version now."

He's quiet for a long moment, studying the scar on my arm like it's evidence in a case only he can see the true shape of.

"Six-year-olds don't grow Crimson Wolfsbane in a kitchen garden," he says finally. "And they certainly don't know how to feed it into someone's food without help from an adult who understands exactly what they're doing."

My breath catches hard in my chest. "What did you just say?"

Before he can answer, a light flicks on in an upstairs window of the packhouse, and Garrick's voice cuts across the yard, sharp and irritated, calling my name into the dark. Kade's eyes cut toward the sound, then back to me, something hardening behind them.

"Go inside before he finds you out here," he says. "But this conversation isn't finished, Wren. Not by a long way."