I was still counting when the lock turned.

I didn't know the number anymore. Somewhere past six thousand, the numbers had melted into each other. Grey light spilled down the stairs. Then came the smell. Jasmine, cutting through the silver like a knife through butter.

Giselle came down slowly. She wore a white wool coat and fur-lined boots. Behind her shuffled three Omegas. Tessa. Pip. And a thin girl from the laundry whose name I never learned. Their faces were grey. Somebody had dragged them out of bed for this.

In Giselle's hand was a pair of shears. Long blades. Silver handles that caught the light.

"Stand them by the wall," she told the guard. "I want them to see."

I didn't get up. I couldn't. My legs had stopped belonging to me hours ago.

She crouched in front of me and reached for my hair.

It fell past my waist. My mother, the only mother I ever knew, had brushed it every night when I was small. For five years, I had braided dried lavender sprigs into it. Callahan used to pull them out one by one while he talked about his day. He said it made his whole room smell like home.

Giselle wrapped a thick rope of it around her fist.

"You won't need this anymore," she said.

The blades closed.

The sound was soft. Almost nothing. A crunch, like stepping on dry leaves. She didn't cut it clean. She hacked. Close to my scalp in one place, at my jaw in another. Twice the silver edge scraped my neck, and I felt the burn bloom.

Pip made a small noise. Tessa elbowed him quiet.

When she finished, my hair lay around my feet like something dead. A few crushed lavender buds were still caught in the strands. They smelled faint and sad.

Giselle stood up and brushed off her coat. Then she leaned down, close to my ear.

"He was never yours," she whispered.

I lifted my eyes and looked at her. I didn't blink. I didn't cry. I didn't give her one single thing.

Her smile slipped. Just a little.

*I know what you are,* I thought. *And I will still be standing when you are not.*

She turned and walked up the stairs. The Omegas followed. The thin laundry girl looked back at me once, eyes wet.

---

By noon, the whole packhouse knew.

By evening, Callahan had seen it.

I was carrying a bucket through the great hall when he walked in with his Beta. He stopped dead. His eyes went to my head. To the ragged patches. To the red line on my neck.

Something moved over his face. Something sick.

Then it turned ugly.

"Double her shifts," he snapped at Thomas Porter. "If she has time to stand around looking pathetic, she has time to work."

He didn't say it to me. He said it about me. Like I was furniture he wanted moved.

So I worked sixteen hours a day. Woodshed. Floors. Laundry. Dishes until midnight. I slept four hours on the cot and woke before the sky did.

---

One night, near the end of the second week, I carried a tray of dirty cups back toward the kitchen. The corridor was dark except for one wall lamp.

Callahan came around the corner.

We both stopped.

He was alone. No Giselle. No guards. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and there was a fresh scrape on his knuckles. Border trouble, maybe. The kind of scrape I used to clean.

I waited for him to move. He didn't.

Instead, his nostrils flared. Just once. His pupils swelled, black eating the gold. Behind them, Ash lunged forward so hard I saw Callahan's shoulders jerk.

He was smelling me. What was left of me. The last thin thread of lavender clinging to my skin.

I held still and watched him.

His throat moved. He opened his mouth like he might say my name.

Then he looked away. He looked away first.

He pushed past me without a word. His arm didn't touch mine. He made sure of it.

I stood in the dark corridor with the cups rattling on the tray, and I filed it away.

My scent still moved his wolf.

That was information. And information was all I had.

---

The sickness started soon after that.

At first it was small. My food tasted bitter. The thin broth they gave Omegas always tasted cheap, so I didn't think much of it. Then my hands began to shake while I scrubbed. My skin turned the color of old ash. Twice I threw up behind the woodshed right after dinner, my stomach turning itself inside out.

*Silver,* I told myself. *A whole night in silver. And grief.* Grief made people sick. I had seen it before.

On the fifteenth day, I fainted in the laundry.

I woke up on a narrow bed in the healer's room. Clara Vance stood over me. Her face was tight and pale. She pressed two fingers to my wrist, then lifted my eyelid and stared into my eye for a long time.

"How long have you been vomiting?" she asked quietly.

"A week. Maybe more."

"After meals?"

I nodded.

She didn't say anything. She looked at the door. Then she looked at my fingernails. They had gone faintly blue at the base.

Her jaw clenched.

"Drink this." She pushed a cup of something warm and green into my hands. Charcoal and milk thistle. I knew the smell. It was what I would give someone who had eaten something bad.

"Clara," I said. "What's wrong with me?"

"Exhaustion," she said. Too fast. She didn't meet my eyes.

She sent me back to work an hour later. But before I left, I saw her pull a small notebook from her coat pocket. She wrote fast, her pen scratching hard. Then she knelt by the old wooden cabinet in the corner and pressed on the bottom board.

It lifted.

She saw me watching. Her face went white.

I looked away, like I had seen nothing at all.

Four days later, she called me in again. Same questions. Same green drink. Same scratching pen.

And when I walked back upstairs that night, my hands shaking so hard I had to grip the railing, I passed Giselle in the hall.

She was smiling at my dinner tray.

Three days after I saw Giselle smiling at my tray, I stopped being able to lift the big stockpot.

My arms felt like wet sand. My tongue felt thick. When Martha asked me to pass the salt, it took me a full breath to understand the words.

"Sit down, girl," she muttered. "Before you fall down."

I didn't sit. Sitting got you noticed.

I was wiping the long prep counter when the jasmine came. Heavy. Sweet. Too much of it, like always.

Giselle walked past me without a word. That alone should have warned me. She went straight to the stove, where a silver sauté pan sat on the back burner. The pack used silver pans for one reason. Wolves couldn't steal from them.

The pan had been heating for ten minutes. Empty. Smoking a little at the edges.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

Then she pressed her whole right palm flat against it.

The hiss filled the kitchen. Her face twisted. Her lips pulled back from her teeth. But she held it there. One second. Two. Three. Long enough to make it count.

Then she tore her hand away, clutched it to her chest, and ran for the dining hall.

"Help me! She burned me! Sydney burned me with silver!"

I stood there with an empty rag in my hand. My brain moved so slowly. *What did she just do?* I thought. *Why did she just do that?*

Then I understood.

Under pack law, attacking a wolf with heated silver is not a fight. It is attempted murder.

The dining hall exploded. Chairs scraped. Someone shouted. A plate shattered. Pip backed into the corner by the sink, white as milk. Martha set down her ladle very carefully, like any sudden move might set something off.

The door crashed open.

Callahan didn't walk in. He came in like a storm. Gold eyes. Shoulders swollen. Ash so close to the surface that the air around him felt hot.

Giselle stumbled in behind him, sobbing. She held up her hand. The palm was blistered and black in the center, a perfect red circle around the edges.

A perfect circle.

I made myself speak. My voice came out thin and slow, like it was traveling through water.

"Look at her hand, Callahan."

He didn't.

"It's the palm," I said. "Flat. The whole palm. If someone pushed silver at her, it would hit the back of her hand. Her arm. Her face. She pressed it. She held it there."

"Cal," Giselle wept. "She grabbed my wrist. She was so strong. I couldn't get away."

"My hands are empty," I said. "Look at them. Look at the pan. It's still on the stove."

For one second, his eyes moved. Toward the stove.

Then Giselle cried out, high and broken, and he snapped back to her like a dog on a leash.

He walked to the hearth.

The long silver poker hung on its iron hook. The one Martha used to stir the coals. He took it down and pushed it deep into the fire.

The kitchen went dead silent.

"Alpha," Martha said. "Alpha, please—"

"Out," he said. Alpha tone. She flinched like she'd been slapped. But she didn't leave. None of them did. They couldn't. He hadn't told them where to go.

I watched the rod turn red. Then orange. Then a white so bright it hurt to look at.

I thought about running. My legs wouldn't even shift my weight.

He pulled the rod from the coals and crossed the kitchen.

"Callahan." I looked straight into his eyes. "You know me. Five years. You *know* me."

His jaw jumped. Ash howled behind his eyes. I saw it. I saw his wolf throw itself against him.

He grabbed my right arm and spun me around. He hooked my collar with two fingers and tore it down off my left shoulder.

The heat touched me before the silver did.

Then the silver did.

The sound was the worst part. A loud, wet sizzle, like meat dropped in a pan. Every wolf in that packhouse heard it. I knew they did. Upstairs. In the hall. In the yard.

The smell came next. My own skin. Burning.

My jaw locked so hard I heard my teeth creak. My whole body jerked. My knees buckled. My vision went white at the edges, then black, then white again.

I didn't scream.

Over his shoulder, I saw Giselle. Her wet eyes were wide and waiting. Hungry. She wanted that sound. She wanted it more than anything.

I gave her nothing.

Callahan pulled the rod away. Some of my skin went with it.

He was breathing hard. His hand shook. He dropped the poker on the stone floor, and it clanged so loud that Pip jumped.

"Cellar," he said hoarsely. "Lock her in."

"Should I get Clara?" one of the guards asked.

A long pause.

"No."

---

The cellar door slammed. The bolt slid home.

It was black down there. It smelled of potatoes and wet earth. I crawled until my good shoulder hit a sack of onions, and I curled around it.

My left shoulder screamed for me. It throbbed with my heartbeat. Every pulse was a new burn. I didn't touch it. I knew better. Silver wounds don't close. They just eat.

I waited for the tears.

They didn't come.

I waited for the grief. The heavy, aching grief I had carried since the night of the ceremony. The one that sat on my chest every morning before I opened my eyes.

It was there. But something was happening to it.

It was going hard. Like wet clay left out in the frost. Like a wound scabbing over with ice.

For five years, I had loved a man who could do this.

No. He wasn't the man I loved. He never had been. I had loved a story I told myself while I stitched his bracers and cleaned his blood.

I pressed my cheek to the cold dirt floor and stared into nothing.

*Remember this,* I told myself. *Remember the sound.*

Far below the pain, far below the wolfsbane, in the deepest dark of me, something cold opened one eye.