Chapter 10
Olivia
"I'm not going back there," I announce, stabbing a piece of roast chicken with my fork. "Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. He can sit in that big house by himself and – and – he can go shift himself, for all I care.”
"Absolutely," Rose agrees, popping a grape into her mouth. "Let him suffer."
"That shifty bastard. He’s so full of shift.” I’m really on a roll here. “He crushed my phone. In his fist. Who does that?"
"A man who deserves to eat dinner alone," Amaryllis says calmly. She grabs a cupcake, stuffs it into her mouth, and practically swallows it whole. It’s her third cupcake. When she sees me looking at her, she smiles. “I stress-eat,” she says.
We're in the grove behind the meeting building, five of us in a loose circle on the grass with our lunches spread between us — me, Rose, Amaryllis, Peyton, and Gemma.
I chew my chicken savagely.
“Can you at least tell me how the treatment of my brother is going?” I ask Amaryllis. “Is there any progress?”
She frowns. “I am working on some different angles,” she says carefully. “I am continuing to…evaluate.”
A sudden terrible suspicion flares up. “Is Kieran in any way preventing you from helping my brother access his wolf?”
Amaryllis hesitates. “No,” she says finally. “He is not preventing me.” There’s more to the story, I can tell, but I also don’t think she’s lying to me. So what could it be?
We hear footsteps thudding towards us, and I twist around to see Kieran stalking towards us.
His eyes land on me.
"You didn't come to my house last night."
The absolute nerve of this man. I glare at him with everything I've got. "You noticed?"
"None of us are speaking to you,” Rose snaps. She links her arm with mine.
Amaryllis, sitting on the other side of me, links her arm through my other arm. Gemma and Peyton link arms with each other and Rose.
"Oh, for fate’s sake!” Kieran shouts. “Peyton, Gemma, what is your beef with me?”
"Solidarity," Gemma says to her potato salad.
“Down with the man!” Rose yells.
Peyton pumps her fist in the air without turning around. "Preach."
There’s a long silence.
"Well," he says. "I'll leave you to your estrogen-fest, then. Some of us have work to do."
He stalks off. My wolf involuntarily lunges after him, almost making me shift, almost taking me with her.
"Don't you dare," Rose says.
"I wasn't going to."
"Your face was going to."
“What does that even mean?” I say, annoyed because she’s right.
I was absolutely going to. My face is a traitor and so is everything south of it. But I pick up my fork and eat Gemma's potato salad and sit with these women in the sunshine and pretend very hard that I'm not listening to his footsteps get farther away.
Amaryllis walks me back to my cabin in the late afternoon.
We've spent the day together — she showed me the apothecary where Rose makes her potions, and the greenhouse where the healers grow their herbs, and I pretended to know what hushbell blossoms were for while she pretended not to notice I was pretending.
It's been the first genuinely easy afternoon I've had since we arrived.
Then we come around the path to my cabin, and I stop walking.
There are boxes on my porch. Three of them, heavy cardboard, one partially open and showing a brass press I recognize because I used to own one almost that good.
Beside the boxes sits a small bag from whatever passes for an electronics store in this part of Arkansas — inside it, a new phone, still in the packaging, a model roughly four generations newer than the one he murdered last night.
And tucked under the phone, a folded piece of paper.
I open it. One line, in handwriting I don't recognize: Paid in full — Gary Kovacs. And a number, which is the number I owed, down to the last cent.
I stand there on my porch holding that piece of paper, and for about three seconds, every feeling I own tries to fire at once — relief, fury, gratitude, humiliation.
Then the fury wins.
"He paid off my loan shark. He bought me bookbinding tools.
He bought me a phone to replace the phone he crushed — who does this?
Who just — without asking — he didn't even ask me, Amaryllis!
He just decided, the way he always just decides, and I'm supposed to be grateful while he runs my entire life by executive order—"
I'm doing laps of the porch now. I can hear myself, and I know I sound unhinged.
Amaryllis sits on the porch steps and waits.
That's what she does. She doesn't interrupt me, or agree with me, or tell me I'm overreacting. She just sits there, calm and patient, until I've burned through the first tank of outrage and come to a stop with my hands on the railing, breathing hard, staring at the trees.
"He drives me insane," I say finally.
"He drives everyone insane," Amaryllis says. "You should know, though, that he's not doing it for no reason."
I turn around. Something in her voice has shifted.
"Our mother was a healer," Amaryllis says.
"The strongest in the pack, stronger than me.
When we were nineteen, a stranger came to Shadowpine lands, mauled nearly to death.
He wasn't pack. He wasn't anyone's. He was just dying, and she couldn't let it go.” She pauses.
"She healed him. She poured everything she had into keeping him alive, and it worked, and he lived, and she'd used up so much of herself that her body couldn't recover. She died three days later."
"Our father lasted about four months after that. Fated mates don't do well alone — you probably know that. He just faded. Stopped eating, stopped shifting, stopped getting out of bed. Rose was seven. She doesn't remember him any other way."
Amaryllis looks at me steadily. "That's why he won't let me treat anyone outside of our pack without his approval.
Not because he enjoys it, and not because he doesn't care about your brother.
He watched our mother give everything she had to a stranger, and then he watched our father disappear because she was gone.
He decided it would never happen again, and he has held that line every single day since, even when it makes him the villain, even when families come in screaming at him, even when his own sister tells him she hates it. "
I don't say anything for a while. The brass press is gleaming in the last of the daylight, and the new phone is sitting in its box, and that crumpled piece of paper is still in my fist.
"He's still a bastard," I say.
"Oh, he absolutely is," Amaryllis agrees.
"But he's not being a bastard for the sake of it.
He's being a bastard because the last time someone he loved put a stranger's life above her own, it killed her and then it killed our father and he had to hold this pack together at nineteen with a seven-year-old sister who wouldn't stop crying.
" She stands up and brushes off her jeans.
"Anyway. The phone is nice. You should keep the phone. "
She heads off down the path, and I sit on the porch with my new bookbinding tools and my new phone and my sour old mistrust, and I think about a nineteen-year-old boy who lost both parents in four months and decided the only acceptable response was to build a wall so high that nobody he loved could ever climb over it to die for a stranger.
He's wrong.
But I understand now why the wall is there, and that's a much harder thing to fight than stubbornness.
I pick up the new phone. It's already set up, which means somebody in this pack has been given my number and carrier information.
I open a text to him and type.
Me: Thank you. I'm furious and you’re an arrogant jerk-face stupid son of a bitch.
His reply comes in nine seconds.
Kieran: You're welcome. I know.