The Alpha's Cursed Spare

Chapter 2: What Mary Knows

Mary is already in my room when I get back from first period.

This is normal. She has a key and a habit and an opinion about the state of my laundry that she has never once kept to herself. What isn't normal is that she's sitting on the edge of my bed instead of moving through it, her hands folded in her lap, her back very straight, and she's looking at the window instead of at the door when I come through it.

The window faces the east courtyard. Nothing interesting happens in the east courtyard.

"Shut it," she says.

I shut the door.

She's sixty-one and built like someone who was once much larger and slowly compressed, her hair gray-white and pinned back so tight her temples look stretched. She smells like the lavender soap she orders from a supplier two towns over because she doesn't trust the pack's laundry service, and underneath that, today, something sharper. Something she's been sweating through.

I drop my bag by the desk. Don't sit. "What happened."

Not a question. With Mary it never needs to be.

She unfolds her hands. Folds them again. Looks at the window for another three seconds and then looks at me and her eyes do the thing they do when she's already decided something and is building up to the saying of it.

"Your father's requested your records," she says. "Academic. Combat. Medical."

I pull out my desk chair. Sit in it backwards, arms folded over the top of it. The wood presses into my forearms in a cold line. "When."

"Yesterday. Before dinner."

Yesterday. Before dinner. Before he sat across from me at the table and talked to my brother Damon about the spring rankings and ate his food and asked me to pass the salt, which I did, which was the entirety of our exchange.

"All of them?" I ask.

"The medical especially." She watches my face. "He flagged the wolf-spirit assessments specifically."

The wolf-spirit assessments. I've had seven. One every two years since I was eight, documented in a file somewhere in the pack healer's office, each one saying a variation of the same thing in increasingly careful language. Suppressed manifestation. Delayed integration. Atypical bonding pattern. The healers are good at finding new ways to say small.

"What do you think he's going to do with them," I say. Also not a question.

Mary's jaw moves. Like she's chewing something she didn't choose to eat. "I think he's going to show them to someone."

"The Alpha."

She doesn't answer.

Which is an answer.

I look at the c***k in my windowsill. It appeared last winter, a thin split in the wood where the cold got in, and maintenance said they'd fix it and haven't. I stuffed it with a folded piece of notebook paper in February. The paper is still there, slightly gray now, doing its small unremarkable job.

"Presley said border garrison," I say.

"Presley Vane should keep her mouth off things that don't belong to it."

"Is she wrong."

Mary stands up. When she moves through a room she does it like she's owned every room she's ever been in, that particular confidence that has nothing to do with rank and everything to do with having outlasted most of the people who thought rank mattered. She crosses to my desk and straightens a stack of books that didn't need straightening.

"What I know," she says, to the books, "is that your combat scores are the highest in your year. I know that Mr. Tallis told the senior healer that your tracking instinct is exceptional, documented or not. I know that you have things your father has decided not to see because seeing them would require him to think about you differently." She puts her hand flat on top of the books. Leaves it there. "And I know that other people have noticed what he refuses to."

I look at the back of her head. "What other people."

She picks up the books. Moves them six inches to the left for no reason.

"Mary."

"There's a thing," she says, carefully, the way you lower something fragile, "about the blood bond. Between a wolf and their wolf-spirit. Healers look at it one way. But older texts — the ones from before the Ashford Pack formalized its hierarchy — describe it differently in certain bloodlines." She sets the books down. Smooths the cover of the top one with her thumb. "Twins especially."

The room is very quiet.

My wolf is awake in my chest. She's not doing anything. Just — present. Listening the way animals listen, totally still, every hair tuned to the same frequency.

"You've been reading," I say.

"I read a great deal."

"About my bloodline specifically."

She turns around. Her face has settled into something I don't see on it often. Not worry. Older than worry. The face of someone who has been carrying a weight for so long they've stopped noticing it until someone asks them to set it down.

"Soren didn't just die," she says.

The sentence sits in the room between us like an object I don't know how to pick up.

I breathe in. My hands are flat on the back of the chair. I can feel the grain of the wood, the slight roughness of it, a splinter not quite raised enough to catch skin.

"Everyone says—"

"Everyone says what they were told." Her eyes don't move off mine. "I was there, Lira. I was in that hospital. I saw your father's face when they told him, and it wasn't grief. Not only grief." She stops. The word only lands somewhere specific. She knows it. She meant it to. "There are things I couldn't prove. Things I still can't prove. But your father requesting those records right now, specifically, with the Alpha's heir's Choosing Ceremony six weeks away—"

She stops again.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

"Six weeks," I say.

She nods once.

The Choosing Ceremony. When the Alpha's heir formally selects his inner circle. His ranked wolves. His future Luna if the Moon Goddess has seen fit to mark one. The whole pack gathers. It's theater and religion and politics dressed up as tradition, and every unmated ranked wolf under twenty-five is expected to attend, and my father has spent four years making sure everyone in this pack understands that whatever rank blood I was born with, I am not to be counted among the unmated ranked wolves worth considering.

Six weeks.

My father pulling my records.

Mary in my room with her straight back and her lavender soap and a sentence she left open on one end like a door she decided not to walk through.

"Say the rest of it," I say.

She picks up her bag from the floor. Settles the strap on her shoulder. Smooths the front of her blouse once with both hands like she's closing something.

"Keep your scores up," she says. "Don't give him anything he can use. And Lira." She looks at me one more time from the door. Her hand on the frame. "Don't let anyone see your wolf act differently than they expect her to."

She leaves.

I sit in the chair for a long time after, the wood pressing its cold line into my forearms.

The notebook paper in the windowsill c***k has shifted slightly. The draft from outside moving it. Just barely. The smallest possible evidence of a world on the other side of the glass that doesn't know this room exists.

I reach over and push it back in.