Chapter 2 What Cal's Wolf Heard

The east wing of the Rio Seco pack house smelled of lemon oil and old wood and something faintly sweet underneath, like the inside of a cedar chest.

The room was small and clean. A bed with a green quilt, a dresser with a cracked mirror, a window that looked out over the water tower and the highway. Someone had put a jar of wildflowers on the nightstand and a pitcher of water beside it. The towel at the foot of the bed had been folded with care, corners matched.

I stood in the doorway for a long time before I went in.

Downstairs, the pack house was not quiet. Boots on the stairs, a radio playing something with a steel guitar, two women arguing about coffee. Under all of it, the low murmur of wolves talking about me. I did not need to hear the words. I knew how it worked. A borrowed Luna in the east wing, and every one of them wondering which of us would break first.

I set my suitcase on the bed and opened it. The photograph of my mother went on the nightstand, face up. The box of letters went in the bottom drawer. The sealed envelope stayed in my jacket pocket, where it had lived for twelve years.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself shake for a while.

That was the part nobody told you about being brave. You did the thing, and then later, alone in a room, your hands finally remembered they were allowed to be afraid.

I thought about his hand. The way his eyes had gone wide, the way he had pulled away like the sand had burned him. I had shaken hands with plenty of wolves. It had never felt like that. I told myself it was the wolfsbane. It made a wolf's senses come through wrong, made touch feel louder than it was.

I did not believe it, but I told myself anyway.

By the time the house went quiet, the moon was up and the window had gone silver. I lay on top of the quilt with my boots off and my jacket still on, and eventually I slept.

And I woke because someone was standing in the hall outside my door.

I did not move. My body had learned this before my mind caught up, and I lay there breathing slowly, listening.

Two sets of footsteps. One light, one heavier. The heavier one stopped.

"She's asleep," a woman's voice said. "Leave it, Cal. Whatever it is, it can wait until morning."

"It can't." His voice came through the door low and tight, strained, like a man holding a door shut against a wind.

"Then tell me what happened at the riverbed."

"Nothing happened."

"Your wolf has been pacing the house for four hours. That is not nothing."

Silence. I heard him exhale, slow and deliberate, the way you breathe when you are trying to make your body obey you.

"She's my mate," he said.

The words came through the wood as clear as if he had said them in my ear. I stopped breathing. My heart hammered once, hard, and I made it be still, and I lay there in the dark with my hands flat on the quilt and my eyes open.

The woman said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly, "Does she know?"

"No."

"Cal."

"I don't know how it works for her. She's wearing wolfsbane. She might not have felt anything at all." A pause. "And if she did feel it, she'll hate me for it. The Council will void the pact the second a real mark shows. You know what the pact says about a true bond."

"I know what the pact says about a great many things," the woman said. "Most of it written by dead men who never had to live under it."

"Keep your voice down."

"I am keeping my voice down. You're the one standing in the hallway talking about your mate."

The floorboards creaked.

"I need you to do something for me," he said. "Tell the pack nothing. Not a whisper. Not to Tomas, not to Dorian, not to your sister. As far as anyone knows, the borrowed Luna smells like wolfsbane and nothing else."

"You want me to lie to the pack."

"I want you to say nothing. There's a difference, and I'm asking you to use it."

"And when the marking ceremony comes and the whole pack can smell her?"

"Then I'll deal with it. But not tonight." His voice dropped. "Please, Hannah. Not tonight."

The woman made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "You've never said please to me in your life."

"I'm saying it now."

Footsteps, moving away. Then her voice, from further down the hall. "You should tell her. Before Dorian does. That man can smell a secret through a brick wall."

"I know."

The door at the end of the hall opened and closed. The house went quiet.

I lay there for a long time with the moon moving across the window. My mate. The words sat in my chest like a coal, and I could feel the heat of them, and I did not want to feel anything at all.

I had come here to keep my brother alive. Rafael was going to march on Rio Seco if the truce failed, and Rafael was going to get himself killed doing it, and I had crossed that riverbed because it was the only way I could think of to stop him. I had not agreed to a bond.

And a true bond voided the pact. The Council would seize on it, and a seizure meant the packs dissolved, and dissolved meant the water going somewhere else, and the water going somewhere else meant everyone I loved dying slowly in the hills.

So he was going to lie. He was going to stand in front of his pack and his Gamma and a Council envoy and pretend the borrowed Luna smelled like nothing, and I would have to do the same.

I turned onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow. My wolf was awake behind my ribs, awake and listening, and she had heard every word.

The next morning I came down the stairs at seven and found the kitchen full of wolves who all stopped talking at once.

Cal was at the table with a cup of coffee and a folded newspaper. He looked up when I came in, and his face did the same thing it had done at the riverbed, closing like a door, and he nodded at me the way a man nods at a stranger on a bus.

"Marisol," he said. "There's coffee in the pot. Yusuf will be here at nine with the pact text. I'd like you to read it before you sign anything."

"Thank you," I said.

He went back to his newspaper. Across the room, a woman with gray-streaked hair and sharp eyes watched us both. Behind her, a tall wolf with dark hair leaned against the counter and smiled at me with his teeth.

"Welcome to Rio Seco," he said. "I'm Dorian. The Gamma." He tilted his head. "You smell like a drugstore, borrowed Luna. I hope that's not going to be a problem."

I opened my mouth to answer, and Cal spoke before I could.

"Dorian." His voice was flat. "Outside. Now."

The smile slid off Dorian's face. He set his mug down with a click and walked out through the back door. Cal folded his newspaper, laid it on the table, and followed him.

I poured myself a cup of coffee with hands that were perfectly steady, and I stood at the kitchen window and watched the two of them in the yard. Cal was talking. Dorian was not smiling anymore. He was looking past Cal at the house, at the window, at me, and his eyes were very cold.

Then Dorian said something, and Cal went still, and the Gamma turned and walked away across the yard.

Cal stood there a while. Then he came back inside, and he did not look at me, and he said, to the whole kitchen, in a voice that carried, "The borrowed Luna is under my protection for the season. Any wolf who touches her answers to me."

Nobody said anything.

At nine, a knock came at my door. A stooped old man with white hair stood there holding a leather-bound book in both hands.

"Marisol," he said. "I'm Yusuf. I've brought the pact."

"Come in," I said.

He sat down in the chair by the window and opened the book on his knees, and he looked up at me with eyes older than the rest of his face.

"Before I read," he said, "I want you to understand something. The pact is not a contract. It is a story. And there are pages in it that no living wolf has seen."

I set my cup down on the dresser. "Which pages?"

He turned to the first page and smoothed it flat. "The ones that matter," he said.