CHAPTER 1
"She is here again, Edda. I can hear them setting up the stage."
I knew the sound of festival preparations the way I knew everything else in Dunmore Pack. By what it was made of. The scrape of wooden platforms being dragged across stone. The particular hollow knock of lantern poles being sunk into their ground brackets. The rising pitch of voices that meant people were arriving from other packs, strangers whose footsteps I had not yet memorized.
I sat on the edge of our sleeping mat and listened to it all come together outside the small window I could not see through.
Edda was behind me, working a comb through my hair. She always did this on festival days. Slow and careful, like the hair was worth taking time over, like I was worth taking time over. Eighteen years and she had never once rushed the comb.
"The biggest one yet," she said. Her voice was low and even, the voice she used when she was managing something inside herself. "I have heard the name Alpha Kallu mentioned three times this morning by Grendon's men."
"Ashenmoor," I said. I knew that name. I had filed it away two festivals ago when I heard Grendon use it in a voice that carried the specific weight of a man who needed something he could not easily get. "Southern region. The most powerful Alpha in the south."
"Yes," Edda said.
"Grendon wants his alliance."
"Yes."
"And Sable is going to be presented."
Edda's hands paused on the comb for exactly one second. Then continued.
"Yes," she said.
I already knew what the pause meant. Sable being presented meant the evening would go in a particular order. Political greeting. Formal dinner. The display of Dunmore Pack's assets, which always included Sable in her finest dress and me in Sable's discarded ones. The blind girl. The cursed child. The thing that Grendon paraded in front of powerful men as evidence of his pack's interesting variety.
Eighteen years I had been that thing.
I pressed my hands flat against my knees.
Today was my birthday. Edda had told me this morning in the dark before the packhouse woke up, pressing something small and warm into my palm. A smooth stone she had kept since the forest. She told me this every year on this day. That she had picked it up from the ground beside where she found me, that the wolves had been circling but not touching, that something in the air that night had felt like a held breath.
She told me I was not a curse.
She told me I was a child the world was not ready for yet.
I held the stone and I breathed and I told myself today was just another festival.
I was wrong.
The evening began the same way they all began.
Grendon's man came to our door below the packhouse without knocking. He opened it, looked past Edda, and said: "Bring her."
Edda dressed me in a pale yellow dress that had been Sable's two seasons ago. She smoothed it across my shoulders and said quietly into my ear: "Head up. Walk straight. You know this floor."
I did know this floor. Every c***k in it. Every place where the stone shifted under weight, every hollow knock that meant I was approaching the step up into the main hall, every change in air temperature that told me I was passing from corridor to open space.
I walked in with my head up.
The noise of the hall hit me the way it always did. Voices, too many to separate at first, layered over music and the smell of food and the particular sharp scent of wolves from outside packs, all their different territories carried on their skin. I processed it automatically, the way I processed everything.
Grendon's voice rose above the room.
"Honored guests." His showman tone. The one he saved for moments when he wanted people to feel they were receiving something special. "Dunmore Pack has been home to many wonders. But none quite so curious as this."
My arm was taken by one of his men and I was walked to the center of the floor.
"Born blind," Grendon continued. "Abandoned by her own father as a cursed child. And yet here she stands. Eighteen years in Dunmore's care."
The room laughed. It always laughed. I had long ago stopped feeling the shape of it. It was just sound. Just air moving.
And then the air changed.
Not the room. Not the noise. Something underneath all of it. A presence on the far side of the hall, large and still, that had been there since I walked in and that I had not fully registered until this exact second.
I turned my face toward it.
The laughing stopped.
Not gradually. All at once. Like something had been switched.
Footsteps. Even, heavy, deliberate. Coming from the far side of the hall. Crossing the floor toward me without rushing.
They stopped very close.
I could feel the warmth of someone standing in front of me.
And then a voice, low and direct, said: "Cece."
My name.
My actual name. Not the blind girl. Not Grendon's ward. My name, in a voice that had never spoken it before but said it like it had always known how.
I went completely still.
Around us, the hall was utterly silent.
"Who are you?" I asked. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.
A pause.
"Kallu," he said.
I heard Grendon make a sound behind me. Something between a protest and a question, the sound of a man watching a plan rearrange itself without his input.
Kallu said nothing else. He did not explain himself or perform for the room. He simply stood in front of me in the middle of the festival floor and waited.
Like he had found what he came for and was simply acknowledging it.
And something in my chest, something that had been waiting for eighteen years without knowing what it was waiting for, went very, very quiet.
Then his hand closed around mine.
And Grendon's voice, when it came, was no longer the voice of a man in control of his evening.
