DEAD MAN'S CUT

CHAPTER TWO : WHAT THE PACK KNOWS

Chapter Two: What the Pack Knows

Aunt Drea makes me eggs I don't eat.

She sits across the table watching me push them around and doesn't say anything for a long time. Outside, the morning is gray and cold and the pine trees are doing that thing where they move without wind, just the weight of their own branches shifting.

I've been watching those trees since six a.m.

Something about them bothers me. Something about the way the light hits them wrong, like the space between the trunks is thicker than it should be.

Like it's watching back.

"You're going to be late," Aunt Drea says.

"I know."

"Rowan."

I look at her. She's holding her coffee mug in both hands the way people hold things when they're trying to stay calm, and there's something in her face I haven't seen before. Not grief — I know what her grief looks like, I've been living next to it for three days. This is different.

This is fear.

"What did Beckett Vane say to you?" she asks.

I set my fork down.

"You know him."

"Everyone in Harlow Creek knows him." She says it like that's not really an answer, because it isn't. "What did he say."

I tell her. Not everything — not the pull, not the way my blood went quiet when I looked at him, not the frayed corner of Wyatt's patch that nearly broke me in half in a school parking lot in front of five strangers. Just the words. The promise Wyatt made him keep.

Aunt Drea is quiet for a long time after.

"He shouldn't have told you that yet," she finally says.

"Yet."

She stands up and takes my uneaten eggs to the sink.

"Go to school, Rowan."

"Aunt Drea —"

"Go to school." Her back is to me. Her shoulders are up around her ears. "And stay away from Beckett Vane."

She says his name like it costs her something.

I pick up my bag and I go.

Petra finds me before first period like she has a tracking chip on me.

She falls into step beside me in the hallway and doesn't say good morning or ask how I slept. She just says:

"They're talking about you."

I don't ask who. I already know who.

"What are they saying?"

"That Beckett stood in the parking lot after you left yesterday." She glances at me sideways. "For like twenty minutes. Just stood there."

I don't know what to do with that so I don't do anything with it.

"He doesn't do that," Petra adds. "Stand still. Ever. He's always moving, always — " She makes a gesture I can't interpret. "He's like weather. You don't watch weather stand still."

"Petra."

"Yeah."

"Why are you telling me this?"

She's quiet for a beat. We turn a corner and the hallway opens up and I can already feel it before I see it — that pine-rain-animal smell threading through the industrial floor wax and somebody's too-sweet body spray.

"Because," Petra says carefully, "what Beckett Vane wants, Beckett Vane gets. And I liked your brother. So I want you to know what you're walking into."

I look up.

He's leaning against the lockers on the opposite side of the hallway. Same leather cut. Same dark hair. Same jaw like an argument. His arms are crossed and he's looking directly at me with an expression that has no business being on the face of a seventeen-year-old boy.

Too steady. Too certain.

Like he already knows how this ends.

I hate it. I hate him for it. I turn left into my classroom without breaking stride and I do not look back.

I feel him watching me the entire way.

Third period is AP English and the teacher assigns seats alphabetically which means I'm three rows from the front and completely exposed and trying very hard to look like I belong here.

Ashveil. A.

The seat directly behind mine is empty when I sit down. I have forty seconds of peace. Then the door opens and the room does that thing again — that current-shifting, water-realigning thing — and I know without turning around.

"Vane," the teacher says. "You're late."

"Traffic," Beckett says.

"We're on the third floor."

"Rough stairs."

Someone snorts. The teacher gives up. And then the chair directly behind mine scrapes back and I feel the exact moment Beckett Vane sits down — not because I hear it but because every single hair on the back of my neck stands at attention like it's been waiting for this.

I stare at my notebook.

The teacher starts talking about unreliable narrators and I write down every single word because I need somewhere to put my hands.

Three minutes in, a folded piece of paper lands on my desk.

I look at it. I look at it for a long time. I'm aware that this is a seventeen-year-old-boy thing to do — pass notes in class — and somehow that makes it worse. Makes it more real. Like he's not just a pack Alpha with a dead boy's patch and a pull I can't explain. Like he's also just a person sitting behind me in third period.

I unfold it.

Two words:

We need to talk.

I write underneath it:

No we don't.

I fold it back and set it on the corner of my desk without turning around. It disappears in seconds. Twenty seconds later it's back.

Something is coming to Harlow Creek. Wyatt knew. That's why he made me promise.

I read it twice. Then I write:

What something.

The paper comes back fast. Like he already had the answer written.

The kind that took your brother.

The classroom keeps going around me — the teacher talking, pens scratching, someone's chair creaking — and I sit in the middle of it with this piece of paper in my hands and I feel the world do that tilting thing again. That thing where the floor shifts half an inch and nothing looks the same afterward.

I don't write anything back.

When the bell rings I'm the first one out the door.

I skip lunch.

I find an empty stairwell on the east side of the building and I sit on the top step and I call the one person I probably shouldn't call.

It rings four times. Five.

"Rowan." My mom's voice is thin and careful and has been both of those things since the night the police showed up at our door six months ago. "Is everything okay?"

"How did Wyatt die?" I ask.

Silence.

"Mom."

"We've been through this. The accident —"

"He was the best rider I ever saw. Since he was sixteen. He could take a turn at seventy miles an hour in the rain and make it look like breathing." I press my back against the wall. "He didn't crash, Mom. So tell me what actually happened."

The silence that follows is a different kind. Longer. Heavier. The kind that has something living inside it.

"You need to come home," she finally says.

"I just got here."

"Rowan. Please."

"Tell me what killed him."

Her breath on the phone. Unsteady. I've heard my mother cry exactly twice in my life and this is the sound right before that.

"Something he couldn't outride," she whispers.

Then she hangs up.

I sit in the empty stairwell for a long time after.

The thing about grief is it doesn't always feel like sadness. Sometimes it feels like rage. Like your chest is a room with all the furniture nailed to the ceiling and you're just walking around trying not to hit your head.

Wyatt is dead.

Something killed him.

And the boy with his patch is sitting in third period passing me notes like that's normal. Like any of this is normal.

I stand up.

I'm done hiding in stairwells.

I find Beckett at the bikes after school again. Like yesterday. Like maybe this is just where he lives.

His pack is there — four of them, same as before. Two girls this time, sitting on the wall. They all go still when they see me coming but Beckett just pushes off his bike and faces me and waits.

I walk up until I'm close enough that I'd have to crane my neck to look away from him.

"What killed my brother," I say. Not a question this time.

Something moves through his pack. I feel it more than see it — a ripple, a collective tension, like a single held breath.

Beckett holds my gaze.

"A rival pack," he says. "From the north territory. They've been pushing the boundary for two years. Wyatt was our fastest rider, our best tracker." A pause. "They targeted him specifically."

The words land in my chest one by one like stones.

"Why," I say.

"Because taking out our best was a message."

"And the message was."

His jaw tightens. For the first time since I met him I see something crack through that steady certainty — something raw and ragged at the edges. It's only there for a second but I see it.

"That they're coming for the rest of us," he says. "And they're not going to stop."

I breathe. In and out. The air tastes like pine and something cold.

"And you want me — what. To leave? Is that what this is? Wyatt's little sister, get her out of town before she gets caught in the crossfire?"

"No."

The word is very quiet. Very certain.

"Then what."

Beckett Vane looks at me for a long moment. Around us the last of the school day bleeds out — buses pulling away, voices thinning, the parking lot going quiet.

"Wyatt didn't just make me promise to watch out for you," he says.

He reaches into the inside pocket of his cut.

Pulls out an envelope.

My name on the front. Wyatt's handwriting. I know it immediately — the way he always made his R's too big, like they were trying to escape the word.

My hands are not steady when I take it.

"He wrote it six weeks before he died," Beckett says quietly. "He told me to give it to you when you were ready."

"How do you know I'm ready?"

"Because you came back twice." Something shifts in his expression. Something almost soft. "Scared people don't come back twice."

I look down at the envelope.

Wyatt's handwriting. Six weeks before they killed him.

"I'm not scared," I say.

"I know," Beckett says. "That's the part that worries me."

I push the envelope into my bag and I walk away before he can see what's happening to my face.

Behind me, not a single bike starts. Not a single footstep follows.

He's letting me go.

For now.

I open the letter at midnight.

Sitting on the floor of Aunt Drea's spare room with my back against the bed and the lamp on low and the whole house quiet, I open the letter my dead brother wrote me six weeks before something in the dark caught up with him.

His handwriting fills the page. Those big R's. His cramped lowercase. The way he always underlined things instead of using punctuation.

I read it once fast and then I sit very still.

Then I read it again.

There's one paragraph I have to read three times before the words stop moving.

He wrote:

There are things about you that I never told you because I was trying to protect you from them. I was wrong to do that. You're my sister. You were always going to end up in the middle of this — not because of me, but because of what you are. What we are. Beckett will explain it better than I can. Trust him, Ro. I know that's a big ask. But trust him. He's the only one who can keep you safe from what's coming. And whatever you feel when you're near him — don't fight it. That's not weakness. That's the only armor you've got.

I fold the letter.

I sit on the floor in the dark for a long time.

What you are. What we are.

I've spent seventeen years being Wyatt's little sister. The normal one. The one who stayed home and went to school and didn't disappear to a small town in the mountains with a motorcycle club of werewolves.

The normal one.

I press the letter flat against my chest and I look at the ceiling and I think about the way the trees moved this morning with no wind. The way the air smelled like something ancient when I stepped off the bus. The way Beckett Vane looked at me across a cafeteria full of people and I felt it somewhere I don't have a name for.

Like recognition.

Like: oh. There you are.

I close my eyes.

Outside, somewhere in the dark, a bike engine turns over. Low and distant. Circling.

Watching.

Keeping watch.

I should be angry about that. I'm going to be angry about that, tomorrow, in the daylight, when I can look at things clearly.

But right now it's midnight and I'm sitting on the floor holding the last thing my brother ever wrote me and that engine in the dark sounds like the only solid thing in the world.

I let myself have it.

Just tonight.

Tomorrow I'm going to make Beckett Vane tell me everything.