CHAPTER THREE — THE BETA'S WARNING
1200 Words
"I'm not a threat to you," he said. "But I could be useful."
Marcus Vane was the kind of man who made helpfulness sound like a debt being offered.
I stood in the corridor and looked at him, and I kept my face exactly neutral while my brain ran the math fast: Beta. Lena's cousin. Powerful in this pack. Smiling at me in a hallway when he didn't need to be.
Nothing about this was casual.
"Marcus Vane," I said, like I was just confirming a name I'd heard before.
His smile widened slightly. "You've done your research."
"I've had good guidance."
His eyes moved briefly — just briefly — down the corridor toward the direction of the kitchens, where Sera would be. Then back to me. He filed that away. I saw him do it.
"You seem very composed," he said, "for someone who arrived here against her will twelve hours ago."
"I seem however I choose to seem," I said. "What do you want, Marcus?"
He tilted his head. "Just introducing myself. And offering some advice."
"I'm listening."
He took one step closer. Not threatening — careful. Everything about this man was careful. "Silverstone is not as simple as it looks. Kade runs a strong pack, but there are currents underneath. Old loyalties. Old wounds." He paused. "A new face can easily get pulled under if she doesn't have the right footing."
"And you're offering footing," I said.
"I'm offering information." Another smile. "No charge."
I looked at him for a moment.
"Here's the thing," I said. "In my experience, free information from someone who doesn't know me and has no reason to care whether I sink or swim — that's the most expensive kind there is."
He blinked.
I smiled pleasantly. "It was nice to meet you, Marcus. I'm sure I'll see you around."
I stepped past him and walked calmly to my room.
I closed the door. Pressed my back against it.
My heart was banging.
He was testing me. That whole conversation was a test. What kind, I didn't know yet — whether he wanted to use me or neutralize me or something else entirely. But the fact that he had been waiting in that corridor was not an accident.
Someone like Marcus Vane did not do anything by accident.
Sera confirmed what I suspected, that evening over the dinner she brought to my room — I was not yet comfortable enough to go to the main hall alone.
"He approached you already?" she said. She set the tray down slowly.
"In the corridor outside my room."
Her face did something controlled. "That's fast." She sat across from me. "What did he say?"
I told her. Word for word, as close as I could remember.
She was quiet for a long time when I finished.
"He's figuring out what you are," she said finally. "Whether you're a threat or an asset."
"And which is better for me to be?"
"Neither." She folded her hands on the table. "The moment you become useful to him, he'll use you. The moment you become a threat, he'll move against you." She looked at me steadily. "Your safest position is to be too unpredictable to place. Make him uncertain about you."
"I may have made a start on that," I said.
She almost smiled. "What did you say to him?"
I repeated my last line. About free information being the most expensive kind.
She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Good," and went back to eating.
I didn't sleep well that second night either, but it was a different kind of sleeplessness. Not grief this time. Something more alert.
I lay in the dark and I made myself think through everything clearly.
My mother had put my name on a debt I knew nothing about. Whatever arrangement she had made with Silverstone — whatever she had borrowed or promised or bartered — she had done it using me as the collateral, without my knowledge, years ago. I had been the payment waiting to happen.
That was a specific kind of betrayal. Not hot and sudden but cold and premeditated. She had looked at me my entire life knowing this was where I was going.
I breathed through it.
I could be angry. I was angry. But anger without direction is just noise, and I needed to think.
Kade had a contract. Legally, I was here. What I was in this pack beyond that piece of paper depended entirely on what I did next.
Marcus was watching. Lena was hostile. The pack was assessing.
And Kade Blackthorn — who had given me thirty seconds of conversation this morning and fifteen minutes of cold clarity this afternoon — was the most powerful person in this territory, and he had spent approximately no time actually seeing me.
I stared at the ceiling.
Make him uncertain, Sera had said, about Marcus. But uncertainty had limits. At some point I needed something more than just being unreadable.
I needed to be real. Visible. Present in a way that wasn't ignorable.
Not loud. Not reckless. But undeniably, stubbornly present.
Starting tomorrow.
I found the training grounds by following the sound.
Early morning — before breakfast, before the estate fully woke up — I had dressed, pulled my hair back, and walked in the direction of noise and footsteps I'd heard from my window.
The grounds were below the east side of the estate, partially sheltered by the tree line. A dozen pack members were already there when I arrived — running, drilling, sparring in pairs. Nobody supervised them. They just... worked.
I stood at the edge and watched.
I had trained back home. Not formally — there was no one to formally train me — but I had spent years doing physical work, and I had always moved my body the way someone moves when they know it is the only reliable thing they have.
A man noticed me watching and nudged another. Heads turned.
I didn't leave.
I walked to the edge of the track, started stretching, and when a woman running laps came around for the third time and slowed to look at me, I just nodded and joined the circuit.
She ran beside me for two laps without speaking.
Then she said, "You're the contract mate."
"Nora," I said. "You?"
"Dex." A pause. "You're faster than I expected."
"People usually expect less of me than they should," I said.
She looked at me sideways. Then — slowly, genuinely — she grinned. "Fair enough."
We ran another two laps.
It was the most normal I had felt in three days.
I didn't know that Kade had walked onto the upper balcony of the estate with a cup of coffee in his hand at that moment, intending to check on the morning routine of the training grounds, and had instead stopped and stood there watching a girl he had barely spoken to run circles around his people without being asked and without permission, her hair coming loose from its tie, her face forward, her stride completely unbothered.
He stood there for four minutes.
Then he went back inside without drinking his coffee.
- Writer
