3: Crown & Claw
1006 Words
Ava didn't look back. She had no phone, no coat, no money. Just a ruined dress and blood drying sticky on her palms.
The bus wheezed up. She climbed in, bare feet black on the metal steps. The fluorescent light made her look like a ghost—torn silk and wild hair. The other passengers stared, then looked away. Nobody sat near her.
She pressed her forehead to the window, let the vibration rattle her skull. Every bump was Ryan's voice. Placeholder. Every pothole was her father's door slamming. Decorative. She dug her nails into her thigh until it hurt worse than the memory.
The bus emptied out. Neighborhoods changed—glass towers to cracked concrete, BMWs to busted neon signs. The kind of place where you settled scores with fists, not lawyers.
"End of the line."
The driver's voice dragged her out. She stood on wet asphalt, still barefoot. The pavement was ice and glass. She walked until she found a teenager leaning against tagged brick.
"Is there a doctor around here?"
The teen looked at her dress. Her feet. "You lost, princess?"
"Doctor," she said. Not a question.
He pointed. "Crown & Claw" But don't expect magazines in the waiting room."
The Crown & Claw looked like a place you'd dump a body, not heal one. Steel door, no windows. Inside smelled like antiseptic and something burned—chemical, acrid, human suffering, not the clean copper of wolf blood.
Inside, a man sat behind a desk, stitching a gash on someone's arm. He didn't look up. Didn't flinch. The patient—a brawler twice Ava's size—was sweating, cursing, bleeding onto the linoleum, and the man's hands never shook.
She knew that face. Or she knew a version of it.
Wolf Weekly. Years ago, when she was sixteen and still believed in fairy tales, she'd seen him on glossy covers—Silas Vane, the Wolf Who Would Be King. Pack Golden Boy, next in line for Alpha, the face that launched a thousand mergers. Then nothing. One month he was everywhere, the next he'd stepped back, walked away, disappeared. The magazines never said why. Just noted the absence, moved to the next sensation.
That Silas had been polished. Camera-ready. Smiling with teeth that looked expensive.
This Silas had shadows where the smile used to be. Gray eyes that had forgotten warmth. A jawline still sharp but harder, like stone weathered by something worse than time. He looked like a man who'd been dismantled and rebuilt with fewer parts.
But it was him. The scar above his left eyebrow—that small, precise line—she remembered that from the cover of Lunar Business Monthly, the issue where they'd predicted he'd control the western territories by thirty.
"I'm looking for the doctor," Ava said.
Silas tied off the suture. Snipped the thread with teeth that looked like they'd done worse. Finally looked up.
His eyes moved from her damp hair down to her bare, blackened feet. Assessing. Pricing. Weighing the cost of her inevitable failure against the entertainment value of her attempt.
"We don't do cosmetic work," he said.
"I'm not—"
"You're Ava Hale." He tossed the bloody gauze in a bin. "Saw the video. Nice swing." A pause. "Stupid. But nice."
He turned a tablet around. The video was already playing. A girl in black silk, screaming, rock coming down on glass. Again. Again.
The headline: Hale Heiress Humiliated. Blackwood-Vale Merger Leaves 'Placeholder' in Rain.
Silas didn't smile. Just watched her face crumble.
"Most rich girls faint," he said. "You committed a felony."
Her throat burned. She stepped forward anyway, left bloody footprints on his floor. They were darker now, fresher—the cuts on her soles had reopened, were bleeding again, human blood that wouldn't clot fast, wouldn't heal clean.
"Was," she said. "Not anymore." She leaned over the desk, close enough to smell the smoke on his collar, the wolf beneath it. The predator musk that made her human hindbrain want to bolt. "That girl's dead.
I'm what crawled out."
She swayed. Caught herself on the desk edge. The room tilted, then steadied.
"I need a job," she said.
"You need a hospital." He stood. Six-four, built like he'd been carved from the concrete outside. "You're bleeding on my floor."
"I need to learn." She stepped closer. Her feet hurt. Everything hurt. The pain wasn't distant anymore—it was loud, a human body announcing its damage, its limits, its mortality. "How to fight. How to survive being nothing." She looked up at him. "You survived it. Teach me."
Silas studied her. The blood on her cheek. The glass in her palm. The fever-brightness in her eyes, the way she held herself too still, like movement would shatter her.
He laughed. Not friendly. The sound of a man who'd heard too many last requests.
"Pick up that mop," he said, nodding to the corner.
"Clean the floor. If you can handle the smell without puking, we'll talk."
Ava looked at the mop. The bucket. The filth—blood and antiseptic and dirt that didn't wash off.
Three hours ago, she'd worn eight thousand dollars of silk.
She picked it up.
The handle was rough against her palm, the cuts, the reality of what she was doing. Her arms shook. Not from emotion—from exhaustion, from blood loss, from the human body she'd been ignoring finally demanding reckoning.
She didn't flinch. She'd already broken the most expensive thing she'd ever touched. What was a little grime?
"There's a room in the back," Silas said, not looking at her. "Last person who used it didn't survive the week."
Ava didn't say thank you. Nice girls said thank you.
She just started mopping.
Silas watched her for a while—the way her shoulders trembled, the way she blinked too fast, the way she was clearly going to collapse before she finished half the room.
Then he sat back down and picked up his needle, like she'd already stopped existing.
- Writer
