Chapter 2

Asher

We should’ve stopped in Missoula.

I tell Dom that at the last gas station, when the sleet starts coming in sideways and Dutch’s back tire nearly goes out from under him on the on-ramp. Dom says Missoula is two hours out of the way and he wants to be over the pass by tomorrow night. Dom always wants to be somewhere by tomorrow night. He’s been like that since his father died, like if he stops moving for one second, something will catch up to him.

So we push on, and by four the road is gray slush, and even Dom can’t pretend it’s fine anymore. When the sign for Barlow comes up, he lifts two fingers off the grip and points, and the six of us peel off the highway behind him.

The diner sits at the edge of town between a gas station and a lot full of snowed-in tractors. Lone Pine, the sign says, with a bulb out in the e. It looks warm. Right now, that’s all I care about.

My phone buzzes when I pull my gloves off. Ellie.

Ellie: Are you dead? Mom says you’re not answering.

Asher: Not dead. Wet. Stopping for food.

Ellie: Bring me jerky from that place in Idaho

Asher: We’re in Montana.

Ellie: Then bring me Montana jerky

I’m grinning when I shove the phone back in my pocket. Nineteen years old, and my sister still thinks every run is a souvenir trip.

Shane holds the door, and the heat hits me first. Coffee, bacon, the sweet burnt smell of a griddle that’s been going since dawn. A woman in her sixties behind the counter tells us to sit anywhere. Dutch tips an imaginary hat to her. The others fan out toward the big corner booth, dripping all over her floor.

I push my hood back.

And I stop.

There’s a waitress by the window with a rag at her feet, like she dropped it and forgot it was ever in her hand. Small. Short dark hair cut blunt at her jaw. A thin line of black liner along her lower lashes. A gray sweater with the sleeves pulled down over her fingers.

She’s too thin. That’s the first thing I notice, and I don’t understand why it’s the first thing until I see her face.

I know that face.

I’ve known it since I was nine years old and she was the new girl hiding behind her mother’s legs in Ray’s driveway, refusing to tell any of us her name. I knew it at twelve, sunburned and squinting on the garage roof. At fourteen, laughing so hard at something I said that she slid right off the hood of my dad’s truck. I know the thin scar through her left eyebrow, because I was holding the ladder the day she got it.

She was my best friend. For most of my life, she was the first person I looked for in any room.

Then, the year she turned sixteen, she became someone none of us recognized. Lies. Fights. Things broken that couldn’t be fixed. And one night, after the worst of it, she was just gone, and the rest of us were left to clean up the mess.

I still don’t know which hurt more: what she did, or that she never said goodbye.

The last time I saw her, she was nineteen. Dom, Shane, and I were scouting the river the day of Silvercrest’s harvest fair, and there she was on the far bank. Long blue dress. Light hair braided all the way down her back. Close enough to see, too far to call out. She had no idea we were there.

Then a man in a good coat touched her back, and she turned and went with him, as easily as if Iron Fang had never existed.

I went home that night and told myself it was the last time I’d let her hurt me. I meant it. I’ve meant it every day since.

The girl at the river had long hair, a straight back, and a life none of us could give her. A year later, she was some elder’s son’s perfect wife. This woman has dyed hair and thrift-store clothes and a face that’s all sharp edges.

And she smells human.

I breathe in to be sure. Coffee. Bleach. Fryer oil. Something smoky and green, like crushed leaves tossed on a fire. And under all of it, so faint I almost miss it, the thinnest trace of wolf.

Not a healthy one. Not a pack wolf. Just a thread of it, buried deep.

Rogues smell like that sometimes. The ones who’ve been alone too long.

“Ash.” Dom’s voice, low, at my shoulder. “You coming or not?”

I don’t answer. I can’t look away.

“Neve?”

It leaves me before I can stop it, barely a breath. No human in this room could hear it.

She does.

She hasn’t looked away either. Her eyes are the same gray they always were, wide and fixed on mine, and there’s no confusion in them. No polite can I help you.

She knows me.

Then something in her breaks. She turns and bolts for the kitchen.

Dom follows my line of sight just in time to see her disappear through the swinging door. I feel him go still beside me.

“Was that—”

I’m already moving.

The woman behind the counter calls after me as I pass. I don’t stop. The kitchen is hot and loud, and a cook with a gray ponytail looks up from the grill with a spatula in his hand. The back door is still swinging shut.

I hit it with my shoulder and come out into the alley, into the sleet. A dumpster. A stack of crates. A gravel lot behind the building, white with half-frozen slush, and a small figure in a gray sweater running across it with no coat on.

She was always fast. When we were kids, she could beat every one of us to the river except Dom.

But she isn’t a kid anymore, and something is wrong with her. I can hear it in her breathing, ragged and too quick. Halfway across the lot she stumbles, catches herself, and keeps going. Slower now.

I close the distance in ten strides.

“Neve—”

She hits a patch of ice at the edge of the lot and goes down hard on one knee. I reach her before she can get up and grab her arm to steady her.

The moment my hand closes around it, she goes rigid.

Not the way someone tenses when they slip. The way someone goes still when they’re waiting to be hit.

I let go so fast I almost lose my footing.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey. It’s okay. I’m not—”

She scrambles back from me across the ice until her shoulders hit the chain-link fence. Sleet in her hair. Her sweater soaked through. She’s shaking, and I can’t tell how much of it is the cold.

She’s afraid of me.

I’ve seen Neve scared before. Of thunderstorms. Of the deep end of the quarry. Of Ray’s face the night she backed his truck into the mailbox. But she was never once scared of me.

I was the one she ran to.

Up close, it’s worse. Dark circles under her eyes. Lips gone pale. Collarbones sharp at the neck of her sweater. When we were kids, she was the strongest girl in the pack. Now she looks like the wind could take her.

What happened to you?

I don’t say it. I don’t have the right to ask, and I remind myself I don’t want to know. Whatever happened to her, she walked into it. She chose Silvercrest over us. I’m not going to feel sorry for her.

She lifts her chin. It’s such a familiar move that something twists hard in my chest.

“I don’t know who you think I am,” she says, hoarse, “but you’ve got the wrong person. My name is Jo. I just work here.”

She says it well. Flat and calm, the way you’d talk to a drunk at closing time. If I didn’t know her, I might even believe it.

Behind me, the back door bangs open. Boots on gravel. Dom. I don’t turn around.

I crouch in the slush so we’re eye to eye, and I keep my hands where she can see them.

Her gaze flicks to my face, to my hands, and back. Then I watch her realize I’m looking at the scar through her eyebrow.

I watch her understand that it’s over.

“Hello, Neve,” I say.