Chapter 7
Eventually I get up off the floor. My knees ache and my hands are stiff and the carpet has pressed a pattern into my palms. The corridor is still empty. Nobody found me. Nobody came looking.?
I go back to our room. His room, now.
Ronan isn’t there — he’s probably still with the Council, going over their plan for the Acension, whatever it is now. I turn the doorknob as if I expect it to be locked, even though I was the last person to be in here. I step inside and the room smells like him — cedar and skin-heat, soaked into the pillows and the curtains and the air itself — and the bond tugs at me, faint and aching, and I ignore it because ignoring it is apparently a skill I’ve perfected over the last days and weeks. Maybe months. I don’t know. I don’t know anything now.
I get my duffel from the top of the closet, the canvas one I brought when I moved in, two and a half years ago. I was nineteen. Before this room, I shared one with Soleil in our parents’ house — twin beds on opposite walls, her combat gear on the left and my textbooks on the right, our shoes mixed up in the middle because we wore the same size. When Ronan claimed me as his mate, I packed this duffel and carried it down the hall and that was it. My whole life fit in one bag. I remember thinking it should feel like more — like a bigger transition, a ceremony, a door closing and another opening. Instead I just carried a bag a few blocks, and unpacked it into half a closet.
Half a closet. Half a claim. I’m only seeing that now.
I open the closet. My side, his side. I take the healer scrubs — four sets, folded by the laundry service the clinic uses and soft from washing. My clinic bag with the hand wraps and the suture kit and the little tin of scar cream I use on my palm when the cold makes the tissue tight. Toiletries from the bathroom — my toothbrush, the face wash, the hair ties. I leave the Luna clothes. The gowns for dinners, the pantsuit I wore to the Greymist negotiations, the silk blouses and sleek blazers and expensive shoes . Those belong to a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore.
I look around the room for anything else personal. Something that’s mine alone, something I brought into this space that isn’t a uniform or a tool.
There’s nothing. The art on the walls is Ronan’s. The photos on the dresser are of me and Ronan, mostly taken by Soleil. The blanket at the foot of the bed was a gift to us together from my parents to celebrate our first anniversary. I’ve lived in this room for two and a half years and I haven’t left a mark on it. I could walk out right now and nobody would know a second person had been here, and that thought should hurt more than it does but the place where the hurt goes is full.
The duffel isn’t full, but there’s nothing else I want. I zip it closed and I leave without looking at the bed.
----
The pack operations office is on the ground floor of the central building, behind a window with a counter. Lorie Novik runs it — mid-forties, efficient, manages room assignments and supply logistics and the hundred small administrative details that keep a pack functioning. I’ve worked with her for three years to make sure our diplomatic and trade guests are housed appropriately. She’s competent and neutral and she will know by now.
She knows.
I can see it in the half-second pause when I set my duffel on the counter. Her eyes go to the bag, then to my face, then carefully to a point just past my left shoulder. Something prickles at the base of my skull — a brief, blurred pressure, there and gone, and for a second I get a flash of something that isn’t on Lorie’s face at all. Discomfort and curiosity and under both of them a thread of something harder. Disapproval, maybe. Or judgment.
Then it’s gone. My head is my own. Lorie’s face is arranged into professional neutrality and I’m standing at the counter with a duffel bag and cold hands.
“I need a new room assignment,” I say. “Something available tonight.”
“Of course.” She pulls up a ledger. Flips pages. I can’t believe this isn’t electronic, and part of me goes to make a note to look into that before remembering it’s not my job any more.
Lorie doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t need to — the duffel says enough, and whatever traveled down the pack’s gossip channels in the last hour filled in the rest. “We’ve got a few options. Let me see what’s open in the east wing...” Where Ronan’s room is, but also where most of the other guest suites are.
She runs her finger down the column. Pauses. Flips another page. I watch her skip past three entries without stopping — rooms she considered and rejected, though I can’t tell whether she’s rejecting them for me or holding them for someone who matters more.
“Here we go. Room 14, east wing, third floor. It’s a single.”
“That’s fine.”
She hands me a key. It’s a plain brass one, smaller than the key to the Alpha’s quarters, which I left on the kitchen counter next to the agenda notice from Saturday. We never bothered to lock the door. Why would we, in the Alpha’s house?
“If you need anything —” she starts, and her voice has a careful note in it. The same careful note Petra had in the corridor, and Yara in the kitchen. The tone people use when they’ve decided your situation before you’ve explained it.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you, Lorie.”
----
Room 14 is at the end of the east wing’s third floor corridor, past the guest suites, up a flight of stairs and tucked under the eaves like an afterthought.
Inside: a twin bed pushed against the wall. A narrow window that faces the inner courtyard — no view, just the blank stone of the opposite wing. A wardrobe that’s barely a wardrobe, more of a standing cupboard. One shelf. A small desk, the kind that folds down from the wall. An incredibly tiny kitchenette, with a a counter just big enough to sit atop a dorm-sized fridge, a sink, and an electric kettle in a box with instant coffee and a pair of mugs. The ceiling is sloped on one side because of the roofline, and I can’t stand up straight in the corner nearest the window. It’s scrupulously clean, with a navy blue comforter on the bed and hotel pillows. There’s an en suite with a shower so tiny I can’t open the door all the way without hitting the towel rack, but at least it’s mine.
This is a room for delegation staff’s children. Visiting healers who won’t spend any time outside the territory clinic. Wolves passing through without a pack to impress or rogue status to harass, but to provide poor hospitality reflects badly on the pack.
I set the duffel on the bed, and I sit next to it and the springs creak — a single, resigned sound.
I should be angry about this room. Two hours ago I was sharing quarters with my mate, the future alpha, with luxury bedding, a thermostat set however we liked, and more space than anyone needed. Now I have a twin bed under a sloped ceiling and a window that shows me a wall.
But what I feel, sitting on this bed in this small strange room, isn’t anger.
It’s the first space that’s been entirely mine that I can remember. Ever.
I went from the room I shared with Soleil to Ronan’s room. From my twin’s space, because no one says no to her, to my mate’s space. I’ve never lived alone. I’ve never had a door that locks to the rest of the world and a bed that holds only me and a shelf where I can put my things without them touching someone else’s. The room is too small and the mattress is too thin and the ceiling cuts the corner at an angle that will annoy me every morning. And nobody else is in it.
I unpack the duffel. Scrubs in the wardrobe. Clinic bag on the desk. Toiletries in the bathroom — my toothbrush, my face wash, the scar cream. I line them up along the back edge of the vanity, evenly spaced, and the space is still mostly empty and the emptiness feels like breathing room.
In the clinic bag, tucked between the hand wraps and the suture supplies, there’s a supply requisition form I picked up last week. I pull it out. Standard form — quarterly donations to the pack’s healer corps from external sources. I’d been tracking the numbers because the supply shortages have been getting worse and I wanted to know where the gaps were.
The form lists three external sources. Two are regional packs that contribute small amounts — bandages, basic herbs, nothing significant. The third is the Ironholt commune. Their contribution used to be substantial — specialized medicines, surgical supplies, equipment the pack’s own budget couldn’t cover. But the numbers have been shrinking. This quarter’s donation is half of what it was a year ago. The quarter before that, two-thirds. The commune is pulling back, slowly, and the pack’s healer corps is getting thinner every time.
I look at the form. Ironholt. A. Vasik. A facility outside the pack. A facility that’s been watching our supply requests shrink and has been shrinking its contributions to match, and underneath the numbers there’s a question I can almost hear, but can’t quite understand. It’s not my job any more, really. I’m just another healer now.
I fold the form and put it back in the clinic bag. I don’t know what to do with it yet. I don’t know what to do with anything yet.
I lie down on the twin bed. The mattress sags under me and my feet hang over the end by two inches and the pillow smells like laundry soap instead of cedar. Distantly, sound carries up the stairwell, and I can hear footsteps as people go about their afternoon, heading to dinner, heading to rooms that are properly sized and properly assigned.
Somewhere in this building, Ronan is in our old quarters. His quarters. He’ll notice the duffel is gone and the closet is half-empty and my key is on the counter. He’ll find out which room I’m in — Lorie will tell him, or Margot will, because everything in this pack reaches him eventually.
He’ll come find me. I know he will. If nothing else, Ronan pays attention to details, and right now, I am a very loose end.
I pull the thin blanket up to my chin. The room is cold — no thermostat, just the building’s central heat, and the third floor under the eaves gets the least of it. My feet are ice. My hands are ice. There’s no warm body to press them against, no arm that will find my hip in the dark, no bond-scent on the pillow pulling my wolf toward sleep.
I close my eyes. The room is small and cold and entirely mine and I am more afraid than I have been since the fitting room.