The Quiet Wolf

Chapter 2

Maren's POV.

By eighth grade, Maren had Brielle Hart's whole operation mapped out better than Brielle probably understood it herself.

Brielle never touched the little ones, the pups in elementary and the underclassmen with no rank to protect them. She was smart enough to know that was the kind of cruelty that got noticed by adults who otherwise looked away from everything else. Instead she built an audience. She found someone weak enough to push around, let her friends do the pushing where a teacher might see, and waited for somebody braver, somebody like Maren, to step in.

It had taken Maren the better part of two years to understand that Brielle wasn't cruel by accident. She planned it the way a general plans a campaign, always leaving herself an exit, always making sure there was a version of events she could tell a teacher, or her father, that sounded almost reasonable. I was just talking to her. I didn't touch anyone. The lie worked because nobody who mattered ever bothered checking it against the truth.

That's when the real fun started, as far as Brielle was concerned. Because the second Maren put herself between Brielle and a target, the target got to walk away, and Maren became the new target instead. It was an exchange rate Maren had learned to accept. One bruise on her bought safety for some random ten year old who had no idea she'd just taken a hit meant for them.

A younger boy, his name was Toby, a Delta line kid, low enough on the food chain that nobody important would defend him, was backed against the courtyard fence while Brielle's friend Priss circled him like she was deciding which joke landed better, pushing him or tripping him. Toby couldn't have been older than ten, his backpack still too big for his shoulders, the kind of kid who hadn't learned yet that some hallways were safer than others.

Maren stepped into the gap before Priss decided.

"He's a pup, Priss. Pick on someone who can hit back."

Priss blinked at her like she'd spoken a foreign language. Brielle, lounging on the courtyard bench with Dana fanning her with a paper menu from the lunch line like she was some kind of tropical royalty, finally looked up.

"Did the trash can just talk?" Brielle asked nobody in particular.

"I'm asking you to leave him alone," Maren said, because she'd found that repeating herself slower sometimes worked, even though it never actually had. "He didn't do anything to you."

"He breathed near me in the hallway. That's a crime against my outfit." Brielle stood, brushing invisible dust off a skirt that cost more than Halden's monthly grocery budget. "You know the rule, Maren. You stand in my way, you take what was supposed to be his."

"Fine." Maren didn't move.

Toby looked at her, terrified and grateful in the same breath, then bolted the second Brielle's attention shifted fully onto Maren. Good. That was the whole point.

Priss's first shove sent Maren into the fence. It wasn't the worst she'd taken, not even close, but she let her knees buckle a little more than they needed to, because the faster this looked satisfying, the faster it ended.

"Pathetic," Brielle said, watching Maren catch herself against the chain link. "You'd think the Beta's daughter would at least try to fight back. Guess murder runs in the family, but courage skipped you completely."

That one landed different than the shove did. It always did. Maren didn't know what Brielle meant by murder, not really, not yet. She'd heard Brielle throw that word at her before like it was just another insult in her rotation, fat, weak, murderer, three interchangeable knives she picked from depending on her mood. Maren used to think it was just cruelty without a target. Lately she'd started wondering if it was cruelty with a target she just hadn't found yet.

The worst part was how casually Brielle said it, like it cost her nothing, like she'd heard it somewhere herself and simply borrowed it, the way you'd borrow a phrase you liked the sound of without ever asking where it came from or whether it was true.

She didn't ask Brielle what she meant. Asking gave Brielle power. She just straightened up, brushed the gravel off her palms, and walked away while Brielle was still mid laugh about something Dana had said.

That night, for the first time in longer than she could remember, Maren actually asked her father directly.

"Dad." He was at his desk again, same as always. "Brielle Hart keeps saying something about, about Mom. About how Mom died. She calls me a murderer."

His pen stopped.

It was such a small thing, a pen stopping, but Maren had spent thirteen years learning every small movement this man made, and she had never once seen his pen stop mid sentence like that.

"Kids say cruel things," he said finally, not looking up. "It means nothing."

"It feels like it means something."

"Maren." His voice went flat, final, the tone he used to end council meetings. "Go finish your homework."

She went and finished her homework. But that night, lying awake again, she ran the numbers in her head the way she'd run a fight. What did Brielle know. Where did she hear it. Who would tell a fourteen year old something cruel enough about a dead woman that even the woman's own husband wouldn't deny it outright.

He didn't say she was wrong, her wolf said quietly. He just told you to stop asking.

"I noticed."

That's not the same as nothing, Maren.

"I know," she told her wolf, and for the first time in a long time, she didn't go back to sleep at all.