AMARIS
Here is the thing about growing up as the only daughter in the Stormshadow pack.
The rumors started before I was sixteen.
I heard them the way you heard everything in that pack, through walls and around corners and from the mouths of won who thought they were whispering. That the Alpha’s daughter was sothing worth having. That she was pretty in a way that made n forget themselves. That it was only a matter of ti before soone did sothing about it.
So of them tried.
There was a man nad Gideon at one of my father’s functions. I was seventeen. He cornered in the hallway outside the kitchen with a glass of whiskey in one hand and his other hand already reaching, his eyes doing that thirsty thing that n did when they had already decided the answer and were just waiting for the question to catch up.
"You know your father wouldn’t mind," he said. Licking his tongue at .
I broke two of his fingers.
He made a sound I will not describe because it did not deserve to be rembered and bent double over his hand and I stepped around him and walked back into the function and smiled at the first person I saw and talked about the weather for six minutes.
My father minded about the fingers.
He did not say a word about the hallway.
There was another one two years later. I was becoming use to the advances, which was worse, no whiskey confidence just cold intention, backing into a corner in the stables with his hand on the wall next to my head and his voice very low asking things I was not going to answer.
I got my knee up before he finished the sentence.
He went down.
I stepped over him on the way out and told the stable hand outside that one of my father’s guests had slipped in the hay and might need so water.
My father heard about that one too.
"You cannot keep doing this," he told , sitting behind his desk, not looking at , shuffling papers like we were discussing a billing dispute. "These are important n."
"They keep putting their hands on ," I said.
He looked up then.
"Then stop giving them reason to," he said, and went back to his papers.
I stood there for a mont and then I left and closed the door very quietly behind because closing it quietly was the most violent thing I could do to him in that mont.
That was the kind of house I grew up in. The kind where what happened to was less important than what I did about it. I got very good very quickly at reading a room, at knowing which exits were available, at keeping myself in one piece in a house full of people who would not have noticed if I hadn’t.
My father, not blessed mories, had his own version of it.
He never tried what the others tried. He was too calculated for that. What he did instead was dangle . At dinner parties, at pack functions, at gatherings where powerful n stood around with whiskey and discussed things of value. He would bring out and stand next to him like sothing he was considering selling and let them look and then take ho and say nothing.
One night I heard him through the study door.
"She’s not available yet," he told whoever was on the other side of it. "But when the ti is right, I’ll let you know."
A pause. Then, "She’s worth considerably more than that."
I stood in that hallway for a long ti after that.
An auction without a gavel.
I spent my teenage years being the thing on the shelf that everyone wanted to buy and nobody was allowed to touch, but I ca through it intact, which was the only thing that mattered.
I ca to Gravemoon a virgin.
I did not co to this ceremony one.
That was the truth sitting underneath my feet when my brother stood up from the fourth row and opened his mouth. Because here is what Darius had not understood when he said what he said in front of three hundred witnesses.
He thought he was destroying .
He had no idea he was saving .
The blood in that bowl was never going to turn white. I had known it from the mont the officiant started explaining the ritual, known it in that particular way you knew things you were not ready to look at directly, and standing there watching it stay red while the priest went pale and the crowd started murmuring I had been trying to figure out what the next sixty seconds of my life were going to look like.
Darius gave them to .
I opened my mouth and said it and ant every word and the person who had put in a position where those words were true was standing in the third row working very hard at appearing sober and I did not look at him when I said it.
I did not look at either of them.
The crowd went completely quiet. The kind of quiet that settled when a room collectively understood it had gotten considerably more than it paid for. I stood in the ivory dress with my bleeding palm pressed against the front of it and kept my eyes on a fixed point above the back row.
Corvin turned to .
His jaw was set. His hands at his sides were very still, the stillness of a man gripping sothing invisible very tightly, and his eyes when they found mine were not cold and flat the way they usually were. They were burning. Contained but burning, the way a fire looked through glass.
He held my gaze for a long mont and when he spoke he did not raise his voice even slightly.
"Wait for in my study."
"Alpha Corvin—" the officiant started from behind us.
"Handle this." Corvin did not look at him. His eyes were still on . "Now, Amaris."
Beta Marco appeared at my elbow. "Luna." His voice was low and completely neutral. "This way."
I stepped down from the platform.
The walk across the grounds took approximately one thousand years. I made it with my head down and my bleeding hand pressed against the ivory dress and my eyes on the grass directly in front of my feet. The crowd had parted rather than dispersed, which was worse, two walls of people and their voices dropping to whispers as I moved through them.
"Is it true—"
"—heard she was already—"
"—before she even arrived—"
Soone touched my arm. I kept moving. Marco kept pace half a step behind and said nothing, not one word the entire walk, which was the most useful thing anyone had done for since this morning.
I did not look at the twins.
I had made that decision before my foot hit the first step off the platform and I did not break it. Not once. Not when I felt eyes on from the third row or when I heard a chair scrape sowhere behind . I kept walking and I kept my head down and I let the whispers wash over the way the Stormshadow whispers had always washed over .
I was very good at this.
Marco opened the study door. I walked in. He closed it behind without entering.
I stood in the middle of the room.
The study slled like him and it was exactly as ordered as it always was, every surface clear, everything where it had been placed deliberately. I looked at the chair across from the desk where I usually sat when he summoned and I did not sit in it.
I went to the small settee by the window instead and sat there with my hands folded in my lap, the bleeding palm face up, and looked out at the grounds where I could still see the pack moving in clusters, the white flowers along the fence holding their position with more dignity than the rest of the evening had managed.
I sat there.
Thirty minutes, maybe more. Long enough for the bleeding to slow. Long enough for the whispering outside the window to settle into silence. Long enough for to stop replaying the bowl and start replaying this morning instead, Ryker’s hands on my face, the door, I think I’m falling for you Amaris, and how I had sent him away anyway and been right to and how being right had not made any of it easier to carry through a ceremony in an ivory dress in front of three hundred people.
I heard his footsteps in the corridor.
I sat up straighter without deciding to and when the door opened I was already standing, because sitting while he walked in felt like a disadvantage I could not afford, and I crossed my arms and held his gaze from across the room and waited.
"Alpha Corvin," I huffed, knowing he was either gonna strangle or let burn.
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