The Soul Beneath Her Skin

There were nine sacks of barley on the wagon. The tally sheet said there were eleven. I counted them a third time, my fingernails scoring the burlap until the skin beneath them paled. Thinking about something else was the only thing keeping my ribs from constricting around my lungs. “Thornleigh let you go, then,” Silas Kerr said over his shoulder. “Thornleigh let me go in particular.” His face was like a boot left out in the rain, but he spoke to his mare with a certain hushed reverence not afforded to me. I did not mind it. He had given me a seat on the tailboard, half a heel of stale bread, and four hours of silence. He broke it in the fourth hour, and I gave him credit for getting that far. “You’re a wolf, though.” “It says so on my papers.” “That’s not what I asked.” I dragged my frayed wool shawl over my ears, tucking the ends into my collar to block out the bitterness of the wind. “Wolf-born. Never shifted. Twenty-four years and not so much as a bad dream about it.” Silas spat over the side of the wagon, and the dark spray vanished into the slush. Half wages. That spit said it all. A wolf who could run with four paws on the ground got a wolf’s pay and a wolf’s respect, while a human got a human’s pay and a human’s place. But a young wolf-born woman whose inner beast had not opened its eyes at all? She got double the work, half the food, and that stifling silence people fell into when looking at something broken. I stopped defending myself when I turned nineteen. Now I simply allowed them to think I was late. “Hallowmere’s a good house for wages,” Silas offered after a mile. It was the kind of lie people told when taking their animals to the slaughterhouse. “And for what else?” “Cold.” He flicked the reins, his jaw firming. “Old.” The road plunged down through a throat of black pines, and the water caught my eye before I saw the castle. The lake at the bottom of the valley looked like a pooling wound, flat, stagnant, and pitch-black. Not dark the way deep water was dark, but dark the way a mirror died when you blew out the last candle in the room. “Blackmere,” Silas grunted, his knuckles white against the leather reins. “Don’t go near it. Don’t swim in it.” “I can’t swim.” “Good. Saves us the trouble of dragging your corpse out.” We rattled through the outer iron gates at half past three, the light dying to a bruised purple over the jagged battlements. The yard was full of quiet misery. Slick, ice-coated cobbles. Someone had been slaughtering earlier. A fresh ribbon of blood ran down the gutter toward the drain. My eyes locked onto it, calculating how many days I had before my hands were forced around the scullery maid’s brush. Under the stable arch, a grey-haired woman let a heavy leather bridle drop into the dirt. A young blacksmith stood frozen in his doorway, his soot-stained hands curling into fists. Four men crossing from the gatehouse stopped mid-stride. Every wolf in that yard turned to face me in the same fraction of a second—a sudden jerk, as if iron filings were snapping toward a magnet charging beneath the stones. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed. The silence slammed into the yard like a physical blow. A place that size, at that hour, should have been deafening with shouted orders, scraping boots, and clattering iron. Instead, there was only the rhythmic drip... drip... drip... of the pump, the mare shifting in terror, and the roar of my own blood in my ears. I had been stared at before. Poverty makes you public property. You get used to men looking at you as though you are either an asset or a nuisance. This was entirely different. Not a single face bore a trace of humanity. No curiosity. No fear. No malice. They had the blank, dilated eyes of predators who had caught the scent of fresh meat. I scrambled off the tailboard, my boots striking the stones with a sharp c***k. Standing on that wagon made me feel too much like a target on a block. “Well,” I rasped into the dead air, my throat dry, “good afternoon.” The grey-haired woman choked on a breath. It was as though a wire had snapped: the gate guards relaxed their stances, and the boy blinked down at his bucket, looking disoriented. But not a single pair of eyes left my face. “That’s not normal,” I whispered, taking a step back toward the wagon wheel. “No,” Silas breathed, his hand creeping toward the skinning knife in his belt. “Silas...” I swallowed. “How not normal?” He looked past me toward the massive oak doors of the great hall, which remained shut tight. When he looked back at me, his face had drained of colour. Pity. Horrified, unearned pity. “Girl,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “Get your sack and run.” The doors did not open—they exploded outward, crashing against the stone walls. The man who tore through the threshold was not dressed for a freezing November evening. No coat. No tunic. His thin linen shirt was ripped open at the collar, its sleeves shredded to his elbows as though he had dragged himself out of a trap. And his feet were bare. I kept my eyes on the stones. Raw, bleeding soles pressed directly against the frost-rimed rocks. Deep gouges ran down his left ankle, dripping crimson onto the ice where he had torn himself past the doorframe at a dead sprint. Behind him, deep inside the dark maw of the hall, a heavy oak table tipped over with a splintering crash. Nobody moved to right it. He stopped six feet from me. He did not close the final gap, but the sheer force of him wrenching his body to a halt sent shards of ice snapping off the cobbles. Stopping had cost him every shred of control he possessed. He was a looming wall of muscle and scar tissue, standing motionless, but his body screamed—every tendon pulled tight. “Alpha!” One of the gate guards took a step forward, his hands raised. “Alpha, control your—” The man did not look back. He simply raised one hand, his claws extending with a sharp pop. The guard’s voice died instantly. He did not demand my papers. He did not ask who I was. He pinned me with eyes that were not human—flaming gold, their pupils dilated until they were nearly pure black. He stared at me for five seconds. Five seconds during which the temperature in the yard plummeted, frost crept over the stones toward my boots, and I realised a nightmare had been waiting for me here long before I ever stepped off that wagon. His chest expanded in a violent heave, pulling the cold air deep into his lungs then a sound tore out of him. It ripped up from somewhere far deeper, a guttural roar forced through teeth he was grinding down to the enamel, a sound of absolute possession. The word shattered the yard. “MATE.” The woman beside the linen basket collapsed, her hands scraping against the wall as she slid to the stones. The grey-haired woman fell onto the mounting block with a muffled sob. Beside me, Silas Kerr dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the freezing dirt. The barefoot Alpha, the heat of his bleeding chest steaming in the frozen air, stared down at me like a starved beast beholding the only living thing left in the world.