REJECTED, NOT RELEASED

Chapter4

CHAPTER 4

Wren point of view

Delia found me a room of my own by the end of that first week, small and plain, tucked at the end of the east hall close enough to the infirmary that I told myself the placement was practical and not, in any way, deliberate. I didn't ask who'd arranged it. I had a feeling I already knew.

I saw Roan every day after that, whether either of us planned to or not. It didn't take long to understand that our bodies had stopped waiting for permission. If I skipped a meal, he'd show up at the kitchen door twenty minutes later looking irritated and hungry for no reason he could explain. If he took a hit during training with his second, a solid blow to the ribs meant to teach a lesson about guarding his left side, I felt the impact in my own body two rooms away, sharp enough that I dropped a glass and Delia had to help me clean it up while I insisted, badly, that I was fine.

We're stuck like this, I told him on the fifth day, sitting across from him in the small office off the pack house library, more ledgers spread between us that had turned up nothing new since the passage about the Devourer. Whatever the rejection was supposed to do, it isn't doing it. We're just going to keep bleeding into each other until we figure out how to stop it.

Or until it stops on its own, he said, though he didn't sound like he believed that any more than I did.

I don't think it wants to stop, I said. I don't have proof, exactly, just this instinct that had been growing quieter and more certain since the night of the gathering, a low knowledge sitting under my ribs in the same place the wound had opened. I think it's building toward something.

He didn't argue with me. That alone told me he'd felt it too.

The rogue activity the border patrols had been reporting all week got worse before it got better. Three attacks in four days, all of them close to the tree line nearest the quarry, wolves that weren't pack, weren't claimed by any territory anyone recognized, running feral in a way the older wolves said they hadn't seen in decades. Roan spent most of his daylight hours out with his patrols after that, and I spent mine in the library with the doctor, going through what remained of the founding-era records, looking for anything that might explain what a Devourer actually was and why the ground under Ashmoor had chosen this particular week, after two hundred years of silence, to start waking up.

It was on the sixth day that I made the mistake of walking the tree line alone.

I hadn't meant to go far. I'd told myself a short walk to clear my head, nothing more, the library's dust and the doctor's grim silences finally getting to be too much to sit with. The trees near the pack house were quiet, ordinary, sunlight breaking through in long gold bars across the path, and for the first time in almost a week I let myself relax enough to just breathe.

Then the air changed.

I felt it before I understood why, the fine hairs on my arms rising, the quiet going suddenly too quiet, birds gone still in the branches above me. I turned back toward the pack house, telling myself it was nothing, and that was when I heard the growl, low and wrong, coming from somewhere behind the treeline to my left.

I didn't see the rogue clearly, not really, just a blur of matted gray fur breaking from the underbrush faster than anything should move, eyes wrong in a way I couldn't name, and I had exactly enough time to think this is really happening before instinct took over and I ran.

I made it four steps before something enormous and dark slammed into the rogue from the side, and the two of them went down in a snarling tangle of fur and teeth close enough that I felt the impact through the ground under my feet.

Roan.

I don't know how he got there so fast. I didn't have time to wonder. I stood frozen at the edge of the path while he fought, his wolf form larger than I'd expected, black as pitch, moving with a brutal efficiency that had nothing gentle in it at all, and the rogue didn't stand a chance, not really, though it took longer than it should have because Roan wasn't just fighting to win. He was fighting like something in him had gone past reason entirely.

By the time three other pack wolves arrived, drawn by the noise, the rogue was already down and Roan hadn't stopped. It took all three of them, shifted and grappling, to drag him off a body that had long since gone still, and even then he fought them too, snarling and wild-eyed in a way that made my chest ache with something that wasn't quite fear.

He shifted back eventually, breathing hard, blood on his hands that wasn't his, and when his eyes found mine across the clearing they'd gone dark in a way I hadn't seen before, something feral still sitting just under the surface.

You weren't even near me, I said quietly, once the others had backed off enough to give us space. It never touched me. Why did you react like that

He didn't answer right away. He looked down at his own hands like he didn't fully recognize them, and when he finally spoke his voice had none of the Alpha authority it usually carried, just something raw and shaken underneath.

I felt it decide to come for you, he said. Before it broke from the trees. I felt the decision happen, like it was my own thought, and my wolf didn't wait to find out if it was right.

That should have frightened me more than it did. Instead something in my chest twisted with a feeling I didn't have a clean name for, gratitude tangled up with guilt tangled up with the same pull that had been humming under my skin since the night of the gathering, stronger now, close enough to taste.

We need to go back to the Hollow records, he said, voice steadying as the wildness in his eyes receded. Tonight. I don't care what the doctor's found or hasn't found. Whatever's happening is accelerating, and I nearly lost control completely just now over a threat that was never actually close enough to touch you.

I didn't ask what losing control completely would have meant. I had a feeling neither of us wanted to find out.

We walked back to the pack house together in silence, close enough that our hands brushed twice without either of us pulling away, and it wasn't until we reached the library door that he stopped, turned to face me fully, and said the thing I think he'd been holding back since the gathering hall.

I don't think I can keep pretending I rejected you because I didn't want you, he said quietly. I think I rejected you because some part of me already knew that wanting you was going to be the most dangerous thing I've ever done.

I didn't answer him right away. Standing there in the hallway with his blood-streaked hands still shaking faintly at his sides and that raw admission hanging in the air between us, I understood, for the first time since the gathering, that the danger he kept warning me about wasn't only the thing sleeping under the quarry. Some of it was standing right in front of me, close enough to touch, looking at me like wanting me was a wound he'd been carrying since before we ever met.

I'm still here, I said, because it was the only true thing I had. Dangerous or not.

Something shifted in his expression at that, softened at the edges in a way I hadn't seen since the gathering hall, before the rejection, before any of it, and for one suspended second I thought he might close the distance between us entirely.

Before I could find an answer to that, the doctor's voice came sharp and urgent from inside the library, calling both our names, and whatever moment had been building between us in that doorway shattered against the sound of him telling us, in a voice gone tight with alarm, that he'd finally found the section of the ledgers describing exactly what the founders had buried beneath the Hollow, and that we needed to see it immediately, because the passage ended with a warning neither of us was going to like.