Chapter 3

Dominic

There’s a kind of hatred you can only feel for someone you once loved more than yourself.

It’s quieter than the other kind. It doesn’t burn. It sits in your chest for years and waits, and you learn to live around it the way you’d learn to walk on a bad knee. Most days you forget it’s there. Then something brushes against it, a song, a scent, a girl with light hair at a gas station two towns over, and it reminds you exactly how much weight you’ve been carrying.

When her father won her from the Moon Council, we told ourselves it would only last two years. Two years until she was eighteen and no law in the valley could keep her in Silvercrest. She hated that place. She barely remembered the man. Her mother marked the days on the kitchen calendar, and I never told a soul I was counting them too.

Her birthday came and went. A week. A month. When I finally got on my bike and rode for the border, Warren was waiting on the river road with three riders and my father’s word: if Neve wanted to come home, she knew the way.

She never took it.

Two years after that, the whole valley heard that Elder Lockhart’s daughter had been bound to Preston Crane. A rich elder’s son with soft hands and a house full of servants. I remember standing in the clubhouse kitchen while somebody read it out loud, and thinking, very calmly, that’s it, then. I took whatever was left of her in me and put it somewhere I’d never have to look at it again.

It worked, mostly. For four years, it worked.

Right up until I come around the corner of a diner in Montana and find her sitting in the slush.

Asher is crouched in front of her with his hands open, the way you’d come up on something wounded in the woods.

“Hello, Neve,” he says.

She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she looks past him, straight at me.

Something in my chest pulls toward her, sudden and hard, the way it used to when we were kids and she’d walk into a room. I tell myself it’s anger.

I barely recognize her. The girl I knew had sunburned shoulders and a laugh you could hear from the river. This woman is all hollows and sharp edges, soaked to the skin in cheap clothes, her hair cut short and dyed dark, the black liner around her eyes smudged by the sleet. She smells of smoke and crushed leaves, and under it there’s only the faintest trace of wolf.

So this is what’s left of Preston Crane’s perfect wife.

I don’t know what I expected to feel. Not this.

“Well,” I say. “Mrs. Crane. You’re a long way from home.”

Her jaw tightens. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? You worked hard enough for it.” I let my eyes travel over her, slow, from the dyed hair to the sneakers soaked through with slush. “What happened, sweetheart? Did the money run out, or did he finally figure out what the rest of us already knew?”

Asher’s head turns sharply. I don’t look at him.

Neve puts one hand on the fence and pushes herself up. Asher reaches to help her, and she ignores him. She stands on her own, swaying a little, and lifts her chin.

“Look at you,” she says softly. Her eyes drop to the patch on my chest and come back up. “President. Your father must be so proud. You finally get to give the orders instead of just following them.”

It lands somewhere it has no right to.

“My father’s dead.”

I see that hit her, a flicker, there and gone. Then her face closes again.

“Then I guess you can stop pretending you ever did anything he didn’t tell you to.” Her voice is hoarse but steady. “Go home, Dominic. You and your pack have done enough.”

I take a step toward her.

She flinches. It’s small, a jerk of her shoulders she can’t hide. But she doesn’t back away. She holds my eyes like she’s daring me to take another.

The Neve I grew up with never stood her ground in her life. She never had to. She had us.

“Done enough,” I repeat. “Your mother cried herself to sleep for a year. You never once picked up a phone.”

Something moves across her face. Pain, maybe. Or something worse.

“My mother,” she says, very quietly, “knew exactly where I was.”

I open my mouth, and Asher is suddenly between us, one hand flat on my chest.

“Dom. Enough.”

“Move, Ash.”

“No.” He doesn’t budge. “Not like this. Look at her.”

I look. Shaking in the sleet. Lips pale. One hand still locked on the chain-link because it’s the only thing holding her up.

And still glaring at me as if I’m the one who should be ashamed.

“Go back inside,” Asher says, quieter now. “Please.”

I could make him move. One word with enough alpha in it and he’d be on his knees in the slush, and we both know it.

Before I can decide whether I’m going to, the back door bangs open.

The diner owner stands on the step with a dish towel over her shoulder and a phone in her hand. She looks at Neve, then at Asher, and then her eyes settle on me and stay there.

“Jo? Honey, is everything all right out here?”

Nobody answers right away. Neve lets go of the fence, slowly, as if she’s testing whether her legs will hold her.

“It’s fine, Marjorie.” Her voice is almost normal. Almost. “They’re old friends. We were just catching up.”

The woman doesn’t move from the door. “Your friends’ food is getting cold,” she says to me, in a tone that makes it very clear she isn’t inviting us to stay for pie.

I should leave. Get on my bike, ride until the sleet washes this whole afternoon off me.

Instead, I walk past her into the kitchen, and I go back inside.

The heat hits me first, then the stares. Four faces turn toward me from the corner booth, and before I’ve even sat down, Dutch’s voice cuts into my head through the link.

Prez. Was that who I think it was?

Then Shane. Dom. Is she—

Eat your food. I push it at them hard enough that Dutch winces. We’re not doing this here.

Asher slides into the booth across from me a minute later. He doesn’t touch his plate.

Neve comes back in through the kitchen not long after. She’s retied her apron and washed her face, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think nothing had happened at all. She refills the truckers’ coffee. She wipes down the counter. She laughs at something the old woman in the window booth says to her, a small, polite sound that’s nothing like her real laugh.

She doesn’t look at our table once.

That’s how I know she’s aware of every move we make. She can hear us breathe from across the room, the same way I can hear her heart, too fast and too light, every time she passes within ten feet of us.

The owner takes our table herself. She sets the coffee pot down hard enough to rattle the cups and gives me a look that would strip paint.

I eat, because it’s something to do with my hands. The eggs taste like nothing. Every few seconds my eyes go back to Neve without my permission. The way she holds the coffee pot in both hands so it won’t shake. The way she favors her left knee, the one she landed on in the lot. The way she keeps her back to the wall, always, even behind the counter.

The girl I grew up with used to sit with her back to the door and never think twice about it.

When we finally get up to leave, I drop a few bills on the table. Asher puts down more, then slides another folded bill under his coffee cup, where only someone clearing the table would find it.

Outside, the six of us pull out onto the highway into the sleet. In my mirror, I catch one last glimpse of the diner. A small figure in a gray sweater stands at the window by the register, watching us go.

I should keep riding. Cross her out a second time and make it stick.

But Ezekiel Lockhart’s daughter is alone in a town nobody’s heard of, hiding her scent, with no husband in sight. Whatever she’s running from, men like Lockhart don’t let go of what they think is theirs. And anything Silvercrest wants that badly is worth something to me.

So run, Neve. Run while you still can.

Because if I find you again, I’m never letting you go.