Broken Crown

CHAPTER 3

"That's all she has?"

Kael Drayden is looking at my bag. It is a canvas tote, the kind meant for groceries. I have one change of clothes inside it, a worn toothbrush, and a photograph I have never been able to throw away, though I couldn't tell you why I kept it. It is the only photograph that has ever been in my possession, my parents, young, standing in sunlight.

"What more does she need?" Colt says.

Drayden doesn't respond to him. He hasn't looked at Colt once since walking through the door this morning. He brought two men with him. One is broad and carries himself like a soldier. The other is leaner, younger, with a kind of lazy confidence that would be irritating in other circumstances. They both looked at me when they arrived and then, at some signal I didn't catch, they both looked away.

"Come," Drayden says.

Petra appears at the top of the stairs. Luca's mate. She is wearing something expensive and carrying her usual expression, the one that lives halfway between amusement and disdain.

"Look at the state of her," she says. "You're taking her to a real pack looking like that?"

I keep my eyes forward.

"She's your problem now, Alpha Drayden. Don't say we didn't warn you. She's bad luck walking."

"I would choose your next words carefully." Drayden's voice is pleasant. That's the terrifying part, how pleasant it is. "The agreement your mate signed last night includes a clause about harassment. You'd be surprised how broadly I'm willing to interpret that word."

Petra's mouth closes.

I have never seen Petra's mouth close on command.

We walk out. The morning is cold and grey and I breathe it in even though I can't scent it properly, because it is outside air and it is not the basement and that alone makes it better than most things.

There is a car waiting. Long and dark. The kind I have only ever seen from a distance.

I stop at the edge of the step.

My legs are not cooperating. This is the farthest I have been from this compound in four years. The last time I left, I was eighteen, and I came back in the back of Colt's truck with two broken ribs, after an escape attempt that lasted eleven hours before I was found.

I promised myself I would not try again unless I was sure.

I am not sure about this. I am not sure about any of it. But I look at the car, and I look at the house behind me, and I do the only math that matters.

My legs carry me down the step.

The lean one, the younger brother, I will learn later, raises his eyebrows when Drayden climbs in after me. I catch it. Drayden catches it too.

"Not a word, Jace."

The man seals his mouth shut with theatrical seriousness.

The car moves.

I watch Cresthaven disappear through the rear window and I wait for the feeling that is supposed to come, relief, maybe, or grief, or something clear-cut and nameable. Nothing comes. Just a strange blankness, like the space a tooth leaves after it is pulled. You keep running your tongue over the gap, expecting it to feel different than it does.

"You're allowed to talk," the older one, the soldier-looking one, says from the front. He has kind eyes. Brown, careful. "In case no one told you."

"Ren." Drayden says it quietly.

"I'm just saying."

"She'll talk when she's ready."

I look at Drayden. He is looking out the window, not at me, but I get the sense he knows exactly where I am and what I am doing the same way you know where a fire is without having to look directly at it.

"Where are you taking me?" I ask.

"Home," he says. Still looking out the window.

"Your home."

"Yes."

"What am I supposed to do there?"

He turns then, and looks at me properly. "Whatever you want."

I don't know what to do with that answer. I file it somewhere uncertain and look back out the window.

Black Ridge Pack territory is nothing like Cresthaven.

That is the first thing I think when the car turns through the entrance. Cresthaven is grey stone and chain-link and mud. Black Ridge is, I don't have the word for it. Organized. Like someone thought carefully about every part of it. The buildings are large but not aggressive. Pack members move through the grounds with the particular ease of people who feel safe where they live.

I have forgotten what that looks like.

Drayden shows me through the main building himself. He is not a warm tour guide, he gives information the same way he does everything, directly and without decoration, but he doesn't rush me, and he watches my face at each room like he is reading something there.

The kitchen is the size of Cresthaven's entire ground floor.

There is a board on the wall. He hands me a pen.

"Anything you need, write it here and it gets ordered."

I look at the pen. Then at the board.

"I don't need anything," I say.

He makes a sound that is not quite a sigh and takes the pen back, and starts writing things himself, clothes, toiletries, things I haven't had in so long I'd stopped thinking of them as needs. He reaches around me to measure my waist with both hands while he writes the size down, and I go completely rigid.

He feels it. He steps back.

"You're safe here," he says. Not gently. Just clearly.

"People say that," I tell him.

"I know." He looks at me steadily. "I'm going to have to show you rather than tell you. That's fine. I'll show you."

He goes back to writing on the board.

I look at my hands and realize they are shaking, not from fear, but from something I cannot name. Something that might, if I let it, become dangerous.

Hope is the most dangerous thing I know.

I shove it back down.

"There's blood," he says, still writing.

I look down. The old wound on my side has opened again. Dark against the worn fabric of my shirt.

"It's nothing."

He turns around and looks at me with an expression that is not angry, exactly, but is the opposite of accepting.

"You're going to stop saying that," he says.