Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 7: NOBODY SLEEP RIGHT ANYMORE

Nobody said anything for a long minute after Selene said it.

I mean that literally. Nobody moved either. The dead woman was still on the table, half-covered, and the room smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it I didn't want to name. My hands were cold. I noticed that before I noticed anything useful, which tells you where my brain was at.

Draven broke first. "Everyone out. Except Selene."

"I'm staying," I said.

"Ariella—"

"I'm staying." I crossed my arms so my hands would stop doing whatever they were doing. Shaking, maybe. Hard to tell.

He looked at me for a second too long, then gave up arguing, which was new. Fenrir left without being told. That was new too.

Selene sat down on the edge of a cot like her legs had made the decision without her. She didn't cry. I'd half expected her to and she didn't, and somehow that was worse than if she had.

"I should've said something sooner," she said. Not to me. Not really to Draven either. Just out loud, to the room.

"Said what," Draven said. Flat.

"That I had a reason to care about this. Beyond being your Beta." She pressed her palms against her knees. "I told myself it wasn't relevant. Six years is a long time."

"It's relevant now."

"I know that." Sharper than I expected. Then, quieter: "Sorry."

I sat down across from her because standing felt stupid and my knees agreed. "Tell me about your brother."

"His name was Corin." She said it like she hadn't said it out loud in a while. Maybe she hadn't. "Older than me by two years. Good tracker. Better than me, honestly, which used to annoy me to no end." A ghost of something crossed her face, gone fast. "He went on a routine border patrol. Didn't come back. They found him three days later."

"And your father called it an accident," I said, looking at Fenrir's earlier words, not hers.

"His father did." She looked up. "Corin was Blackwood. I wasn't born Ashwood, Ariella. I left."

That landed somewhere I wasn't expecting it to land. I didn't say anything. Draven didn't either, though something in his face shifted, filed it away for later probably.

"Why," I asked, because apparently subtlety had left the building along with my ability to feel my hands properly.

"Because my brother's death got buried under a word — accident — and I watched an entire pack decide that was good enough. I didn't want to be part of a pack that decides things are good enough." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, though I hadn't seen any tears. Maybe there weren't any. Maybe it was just habit. "Draven took me in without asking a single question about my loyalty. That's the only reason I'm Ashwood now."

Draven's jaw worked. He didn't look at either of us. "You should've told me."

"Would it have changed anything?"

"Yes." Short. Certain. "It would've changed how carefully I watched my own borders six years ago."

Nobody had an answer for that, so nobody gave one.

I found Talia in the training yard an hour later, because apparently that's where I go now when I don't know what else to do with my body. She was alone, working through some drill against a wooden post, and she stopped the second she saw my face.

"What."

"Nothing." Lie. Obvious one.

"You look like someone told you the sky's on fire." She lowered her arms. "Is it the woman? The one who came over the wall?"

"She died last night."

Talia's face did something complicated. Not guilt. I watched for it and it wasn't guilt, it was just — shock, maybe, plain and normal shock, the kind a person has when someone dies near them and they weren't expecting it. I hated that I'd been watching for guilt at all. I hated it and I kept doing it anyway.

"That's — " She stopped. Started again. "I brought her water yesterday morning. Before training."

"I know."

Something in her expression sharpened. "You think it was me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." She stepped back, just a half step, small enough that I might not have noticed if I hadn't spent six years learning to notice exactly that kind of thing. "I liked her. I don't even know her name and I liked that she made it here alive. I wanted her to wake up so I could ask what it was like, running that far hurt."

I believed her. Mostly. The part of me that didn't believe her hated itself for existing, but it existed anyway, small and cold and awake now in a way it hadn't been three days ago.

"Somebody killed her inside these walls," I said. "I have to ask everyone that question. It's not personal."

"It's extremely personal," Talia said, "when it's aimed at me specifically, by someone I taught myself to trust in about four days." She picked her practice blade back up. "Go ask somebody else."

I went. What else was there to do.

Fenrir found me by the wall that night. Not the balcony. A different wall, closer to the training yard, colder, with a wind coming off the tree line that smelled like rain that hadn't decided to fall yet.

"You should be inside," he said.

"You should be in Blackwood territory. We're both somewhere we're not supposed to be."

That got something close to a laugh out of him. Short. Rusty, like he hadn't used it in a while. "Fair."

We stood there a minute. I could feel him not-saying something, the particular tension of a person building up to a sentence they've already regretted twice.

"I keep thinking about my father," he said finally. "The way he explained Corin's death to me. I was young. I didn't ask enough questions." His hands were in his pockets, shoulders up around his ears against the cold. "I've spent my whole life not asking enough questions, apparently."

"You're asking them now."

"Six years late for one of them."

I didn't have anything comforting to say to that, so I didn't say anything, and he didn't seem to want me to. We just stood there, cold, not talking, which felt more honest than most of the conversations I'd had in the last four days combined.

"Ariella." He said my name like it cost him something. "Draven. Are you—" He stopped. Tried again. "It's none of my business."

"You're right. It isn't."

"I know." His jaw tightened. "Doesn't stop me wanting to ask."

"Fenrir."

"I'm not asking," he said, too fast. "I said I wasn't asking."

I let it sit there, ugly and unfinished, because I didn't have the energy to make it neater than it actually was.

I couldn't sleep. Obviously. Nobody in this story sleeps anymore, myself included, so around two in the morning I gave up and went looking for water, and that's how I ended up outside the healing quarters again, in the dark, alone, when I heard it.

A scrape. Metal on stone. Coming from inside.

I should've gone for Draven. I know that now, looking back, and I knew it then too, some small rational voice going get help, get help, and I ignored it the way I seem to ignore every sensible instinct I've ever had, and I pushed the door open myself instead.

The room was empty. The dead woman's body was gone from the table.

Not moved. Not relocated to somewhere more dignified. Gone, the sheet still holding the vague shape of where she'd been, like whoever took her had been careful about it, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world and no fear at all of being caught.

On the table where her head had been, someone had left something. Small. Pale.

A single gray feather.

I stood there staring at it for longer than made sense, my heart doing something violent and uneven in my chest, and it took me an embarrassingly long moment to place why a feather — just a feather, nothing else, no note, no threat spelled out — felt like the most frightening thing that had happened to me all week.

Because wolves don't leave feathers.

Because whoever did leave it wanted me to know, very specifically, without a single word, exactly how easily they could get to me too.