Chapter 14

Neve

The knock comes before five, and it isn’t the prospect.

It’s a man I half remember. Brock, I think. He was a prospect when I left, all neck and no patience, and now he wears a full patch and a beard he must think makes him look older. He doesn’t say good morning. He hands me a bucket full of cleaning supplies and a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

“Bathrooms,” he says. “All of them. Toilets, showers, sinks, floors. Alpha’s orders.”

“Lena’s expecting me in the kitchen.”

“Not today, she isn’t.”

There are eleven bathrooms in the packhouse.

The upstairs ones are the worst, the ones the unmated riders use. Beard hair in the sinks. Things growing in the corners of the showers that I don’t want to look at too closely. Towels left in damp piles on the floor until they’ve soured. I scrub and rinse and scrub again, and Brock leans in the doorway with his arms crossed, scrolling through his phone, looking up every so often to point at a spot