Stolen Wolf

He didn't answer me. He didn't have to.

Gideon walked out of that kitchen like a man who'd swallowed something sharp, and I knelt there on the wet tile with my heart trying to climb out through my throat, thinking one word over and over until it stopped sounding like a word at all. Briar. Briar. Briar. For three years I hadn't let myself say her name out loud, because grief is grief you have to carry properly, and I hadn't had the strength to carry anything properly. Not since the trial. Not since the cold.

And now I knew why the hollow behind my ribs had never quite healed the way the healers promised it would. A severed bond is supposed to scar over, blunt and numb, like a limb gone permanently to sleep. Mine had never scarred. It had only ever felt paused.

I finished the floor with my hands shaking too hard to do it well, and nobody said anything when the grout lines came out crooked, because nobody in Marrow House looked at me long enough to notice. That was its own kind of mercy. Three years ago these halls had been full of people who knew my name, who'd danced at my initiation, and who'd have died before believing I could put a knife in Corvin Marrow. Now I was furniture. A ghost with a mop.

I told myself that was safer. Ghosts don't get accused of anything twice.

I found the east hall by memory, which surprised me—the body remembers a house even when the mind has spent three years trying to forget it. Portraits lined the corridor; generations of Marrow Alphas painted in that stiff, formal style pack favor for their dead, and I made myself walk past Corvin's without slowing down. His painted eyes were kinder than his son's had ever been in life. That had always struck me as unfair.

I was halfway through polishing the second sconce when I heard voices around the corner—low, urgent, and pitched for wolf ears that wouldn't carry to human ones. Which meant they'd forgotten, for a moment, that I still had wolf ears even without a wolf.

"—can't keep doing this, Gideon. Every full moon it gets harder to hold the line between you and her. You know what happens if a caged wolf breaks free of a body that isn't hers."

That was Rhys. I placed the voice before I placed the face—Gideon's beta, always at his shoulder, a man who used to sneak me honeyed bread from the kitchens when we were children and had testified against me at the trial without once meeting my eyes.

"I'm aware of the risk." Gideon's voice, flat as a closed door.

"Are you? Because it sounded to me like she nearly figured it out ten minutes ago, and if she figures it out fully, if she finds a way to call her wolf home before we're ready—"

"She won't."

"You don't know that."

"I know," Gideon said, and something underneath the flatness cracked, just slightly, just enough for me to hear the years in it, "that if Briar comes back to her too soon, before Wren is strong enough to hold a wolf that's spent three years learning to survive inside an Alpha's body, it will kill them both. So no. She won't figure it out. Because I am not going to let her get close enough to try."

Silence, the kind that has weight.

"And if she already suspects?"

"Then I give her a reason to stop trusting her own instincts." A pause. "Starting tonight."

I backed away from the corner so quietly that even I barely heard my own footsteps, my pulse a drum against my ears, my mind snagging on one detail and refusing to let it go: it will kill them both.

He hadn't stolen my wolf to punish me.

He'd stolen her to save her.

Which meant everything I'd believed for three years—the cruelty, the verdict, the ice in his eyes at my banishment—had been built on top of something else entirely, something he'd buried so deep even his own beta only half understood it. I didn't know whether that made him less of a monster or more dangerous than one. A monster, at least, you can predict.

Dinner in Marrow House was still served at seven, still in the long hall, still with the pack seated by rank around a table built for a family twice this size. I wasn't seated. I stood against the wall near the kitchen door with the other staff, close enough to hear every word and invisible enough that no one bothered lowering their voice around me.

Gideon sat at the head of the table, looking like nothing at all had cracked in him an hour ago. That, more than anything, told me how good he'd gotten at this. Three years of wearing a lie so well it had fused to his face.

He caught me watching him twice. Both times, he held my gaze a beat too long before looking away—not the cold, dismissive flick from this morning, but something slower. Something that felt, uncomfortably, like a man checking whether a door he'd locked was still locked.

It wasn't until the plates were cleared and the elders had risen to leave that he crossed the hall to where I stood, close enough that no one else would hear him, and said the four words that undid three years of careful, deliberate numbness in a single sentence.

"Come to my study. Now."

I followed him because I always was going to, because hope is a disease and I am not immune, and because somewhere beneath the floor of Marrow House, or beneath the skin of the man walking a step ahead of me, my wolf was waiting for me to be strong enough to come and take her home.

I didn't yet know that the moment I stepped through his study door and heard the lock turn behind me, I would stop being able to tell the difference between rescuing her and destroying us both.