The Betting Pool
The betting pool on who would end up with Garrett Cole had reached absurd levels by the time I found out I was the answer.
Twelve marks said it would be Petra Lang, who'd been unclaimed a full year longer than me and had the kind of good hips the elders liked to talk about like she was a mare at auction. Six marks said Iris Thane, mostly out of pity, since her whole family got wiped out in the Kestrel Ridge floods and everyone still felt strange about it. Two marks, and I only know this because Toby told me with a straight face like it was breaking news, said me.
Turned out the two marks were the smart money.
I had my arms in scalding water up to the elbow, scrubbing char off the bottom of the second largest cauldron the pack owned, getting the kitchen ready for the homecoming feast, when Old Marta and her sister Ione decided I was invisible enough to gossip over.
"Generous is one word for it," Ione said. "The Coles could have asked for anyone. Full-blooded, unclaimed, pretty enough. And they picked the exile's daughter."
"Practical," Marta said. "Garrett's on his third refusal this year. Word gets around. A boy can only be turned down so many times before people start asking why."
"So they settle."
"So they settle." Marta said it like a woman laying down a winning hand of cards. Then, because apparently I really was invisible, "Wren. More scrub, less listening."
I did not stop listening. I scrubbed harder, which was the closest thing to a protest I was allowed.
Toby found me twenty minutes later, still elbow deep in the cauldron, and announced his arrival by kicking the kitchen door so hard it bounced off the wall.
"Okay, first," he said, "if anyone asks, I never touched Elder Pruitt's goat. That's slander. The goat left on its own. Second, and this is the actual reason I'm here, the Coles have requested a formal dinner. Thursday. You. Them. A discussion of terms."
"Terms."
"Their word, not mine. I'm just the messenger. A very fast, very innocent messenger who did not touch a goat."
I set the scrub brush down carefully, the way you set something down when you would rather throw it. "Terms for what."
"You know for what." Toby's mouth did the thing where it wanted to smile and grimace at the same time and settled on neither. "I already have four plans. One of them involves your sudden and convincing death. I don't love that one. There's logistics."
"Toby."
"Two of them involve me setting something on fire. Symbolically. Possibly literally, I haven't fully decided."
"Toby."
"What. I'm trying to help."
"I know you are." And I did know it, which was the only reason I didn't throw the brush at his head. "I still have to go Thursday."
"You don't, though. That's the thing nobody tells omegas. You don't actually have to do anything."
"Toby. I do."
He didn't have an answer for that, because we both knew it wasn't true the way he wanted it to be true, and he hated that more than I did some days.
She found me before I found her, which was the story of my life with Selene Voss.
I was drying my hands on my apron, walking the path between the kitchen and the laundry house, when she stepped out from under the eaves like she'd been waiting there for the purpose of unsettling me. Which, knowing her, she probably had.
"Elder Selene."
"Wren." She looked at me the way she looked at ledgers. Assessing. "I hear congratulations are in order."
"I haven't agreed to anything."
"No," she agreed. "You haven't." Something crossed her face, there and gone so fast I would have missed it if I hadn't spent four years studying that face for warning signs. "Sit up straight when you meet the Coles Thursday. Slouching is for wolves who can afford to be picked twice."
She was already walking away by the time I found my voice again. "Elder Selene."
She didn't stop.
"Did you know my mother? Before she left?"
That got her to pause. Just for a second. Long enough for me to see something move behind her eyes that looked, for one terrible second, like grief wearing a formal dress.
"Your mother," Selene said, "made the exact same face you're making right now. Right before she ruined everything."
Then she was gone, around the laundry house, like the conversation had never happened, and I was left standing in the cooling evening with my hands still damp and a new, specific kind of dread settling into my chest.
I walked the rest of the way home through pack territory dark, no streetlights, just woodsmoke and, somewhere off in the trees, a dog losing an argument with a raccoon. My grandmother used to say the woods kept their secrets better than people did. Standing there, replaying that flash behind Selene's eyes, I wasn't so sure the woods had anything on Ashwood's elders.
Thursday. Garrett Cole. Terms.
Lucky me.
