After My Mate Let His Mistress Crush My Hand

The gates of Greyhollow didn't creak when they opened for me. They just swung, indifferent, like they'd done it a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. I walked out with a duffel bag that held everything I owned and a body that had forgotten how to stand up straight. Two years of hauling timber and scrubbing latrines does that to a spine. My wolf sat somewhere behind my ribs, small and quiet, like a candle guttering in a draft. I used to be able to feel her clearly—her hunger, her impatience, the low simmer of her opinions about everything I did. Now there was almost nothing. A whisper. A shape in the dark that might have been her or might have just been memory.

I had no pack. No Alpha would claim a woman released early from an Omega labor camp for a rogue attack charge, guilty or not, and I was long past caring whether anyone thought I deserved better. Silvercrest took me because Silvercrest takes anyone willing to work for less than minimum and ask no questions. I signed on as kitchen and banquet staff. I got a cot in the Omega dormitory, a room I shared with no one because no one wanted to share with the woman who smelled like exile. I said nothing to anyone about Greyhollow. I said nothing about anything.

The work itself I didn't mind. Bussing tables, polishing silver until my reflection warped in it, standing invisible against the walls while wolves who outranked me by every measure laughed too loud and drank too much. Invisible was fine. Invisible was safe. I had learned in Montana that being seen was the first step toward being hurt.

It was during my third week that I found Buster.

I walked before dawn, before the kitchen shift started, because it was the only hour that belonged to me. The road out past the Silvercrest boundary was empty except for fog and the smell of pine, and that was where I saw him—a shape in the ditch grass, matted and still, ribs like a washboard under torn fur. Rogues had left him. Wolf-dogs get used for tracking and then discarded when they slow down or stop being useful. He didn't move when I crouched near him. He just watched me with one eye swollen half shut, deciding, I think, whether I was worth the energy of fear.

I didn't touch him that morning. I left a strip of bacon from my own breakfast on a flat rock and walked away without looking back.

I did that every morning for three weeks. Some days the food was gone. Some days it wasn't. I never saw him eat it, not once, until the eighteenth day, when I turned back halfway down the road and caught him mid-bite, and instead of bolting, he just froze and looked at me like he was waiting to see what I'd do with the knowledge.

I did nothing. I kept walking.

On day twenty-one, he let me touch his head. His fur was coarse and filthy and he flinched at first contact, then leaned in, hard, like the touch cost him something to accept and he'd decided to pay it anyway. I named him Buster because it was the first name that came to me and because he looked like he'd been in a few. That night he followed me back to the dormitory and slept across my doorway without asking permission. He has slept there every night since. I don't examine why that matters to me as much as it does. Some things you just let be true without poking at them.

My supervisor, a broad, tired she-wolf named Odette, pulled me aside on a Thursday and told me I'd been assigned to the VIP service team for a Come of Age Ceremony.

"Tiffany Spencer," she said, like the name itself was a warning label. "Pampered. Volatile. Throws things when she's unhappy, and she's unhappy often." She lowered her voice. "She's got a benefactor. Powerful. You don't look at him, you don't look at her too long, you don't exist unless someone asks you to exist. Understand?"

"I understand," I said. I have been practicing invisible for two years. It's the one skill Greyhollow actually taught me well.

The night before the ceremony, I was polishing trays in the staff corridor when two senior servers walked past, talking low.

"East Coast," one of them was saying. "One of the biggest territories on the seaboard. You should've felt his aura at the spring gala—my knees actually buckled. Actually buckled, Marla."

The other one laughed, low and knowing. "Lucky Tiffany."

I kept polishing. I filed the words away the way I file away everything now—without feeling, without reaching for it. My wolf didn't stir. She hasn't stirred in months. I told myself that was fine. I told myself I'd stopped needing her to.