After My Mate Let His Mistress Crush My Hand

Tiffany Spencer arrived forty minutes late to her own Come of Age Ceremony, which told me everything I needed to know about her.

She swept into the private suite with three attendants trailing behind her and a scent that cost more than my monthly wage—jasmine and something synthetic underneath it, the kind of perfume that announces itself before the person does. She was beautiful in the way expensive things are beautiful: deliberate, maintained, designed to be noticed. Diamond-studded claw covers glittered over her manicured fingers, catching the chandelier light every time she moved her hands, which was often. She talked with her hands. She dismissed with her hands. She made the world around her feel like it existed primarily as a backdrop for her hands.

I was a tray. I was a wall sconce. I was the floor.

That was fine. I had practiced this.

For the first hour I moved efficiently through the suite—refilling champagne flutes, clearing plates, keeping my eyes at the level of collar buttons and chins, never higher. Tiffany snapped orders the way some wolves breathe, without thinking about it, without waiting for acknowledgment. She cut off her own attendants mid-sentence when something shinier caught her attention. She sent back a dessert plate twice because the chocolate shavings were, apparently, uneven.

I kept my face neutral. I kept my hands steady. My wolf was quiet, which was usual now, which I had stopped mourning.

I was reaching across the table to collect a used glass when Tiffany's eyes dropped to my collar.

"What is that?"

I didn't move. "I'm sorry?"

"That." She pointed, one diamond-tipped claw extended, at the faint glint beneath my uniform's top button. "Around your neck. What is it?"

The pendant. I had tucked it in this morning without thinking, the way I always did—habit, the same way breathing is habit. A small oval of moonstone set in plain silver, cloudy white with a faint blue iridescence when the light caught it right. My grandmother had worn it every day for forty years. She was a healer, one of the most respected in her pack, and she had pressed it into my palm the week before she died and told me to keep it close.

I should have left it in my locker.

"It's a family piece," I said. "I apologize if it's visible. I can—"

"Let me see it."

Not a question. Not even close.

I reached up slowly and lifted the chain over my head. My hands were steady. My wolf made no sound. I held it out.

Tiffany took it without looking at me, dangling it between two fingers the way you hold something you've already decided is worthless. She turned it once, twice, in the chandelier light. Her mouth curved.

"Cheap costume jewelry," she said, and dropped it.

Not handed it back. Dropped it.

The chain caught the edge of the marble table on the way down and the pendant struck the floor with a sound that I felt in my back teeth. When I looked down, it was in pieces—the setting cracked, the stone split clean through, the chain tangled in the fragments like something that had given up.

I went to my knees. Not because I was told to. Because the pieces were there and I needed to gather them before someone stepped on them, before they got swept away, before they became nothing.

I cupped the largest fragment in my palm. The stone was still faintly iridescent, even broken. My grandmother's hands had held this every day for forty years.

Tiffany's heel came down toward the nearest fragment, a slow, deliberate arc, and something in me moved before I could stop it—my right hand shot out flat against the floor in front of her foot.

The room went silent.

I heard it happen. The silence had a texture. It pressed against my ears.

"She touched me." Tiffany's voice was very quiet, which was worse than if she'd shouted. "An Omega just put her hand on me."

The enforcers were on me before I could breathe. Two of them, big, fast, professional—they had me face-down on the cold marble with my arms pinned before I'd fully processed that they were moving. My cheek hit the floor. The pendant fragments scattered from my fingers.

"Don't," one of them said, low, into my ear. A warning or a threat. I couldn't tell anymore.

I didn't fight. Fighting makes it worse. I had learned that in Greyhollow on the fourth day and I had not forgotten it.

Tiffany crouched in front of me. I could see the diamond claw covers up close now—each one set with three stones, custom fitted, sharp at the tips. A grotesque piece of work. She tilted her head and looked at me the way you look at something you're about to throw away.

"Clean up," she said softly, "starts with the mess itself."

She shifted her fingers. Just the fingers—partial, controlled, the bones lengthening under the claw covers. And she brought her hand down on my outstretched right hand.

The pain was white. Absolute. It went from my fingers to my shoulder in a single instant and I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize, one short, raw thing that I cut off before it could become anything more. Then I went silent. I went somewhere behind my own eyes and I stayed there while the blood pooled warm beneath my palm and the enforcers still didn't let me up and Tiffany straightened and examined her claw covers for damage with the careful attention of someone who has just used a good tool and wants to make sure it's unscratched.

"Someone clean this up," she said.

She meant me. She meant all of it—the blood, the broken pendant, the mess of what I was. One problem, same category.

I lay still on the cold marble with my right hand ruined beneath me and the fragments of my grandmother's moonstone somewhere near my face, and I breathed, and I did not cry, and I thought: remember this. Remember every detail of this. The exact temperature of the floor. The exact sound her heel made on the marble. The exact way she said clean up.

Remember it all.