FATE OR CHOICE??

FATE OR CHOICE

Book Two of the Rogues or Rules Duology

ROLEX

Some people come home and find out the door was only ever open for the person they used to be~ROLEX

Aella...

The floor was the only part of my room that made sense.

Kace had given me the biggest bedroom on the second floor of my brother’s new house, the one with the window that looked over the pines and a bed so soft it swallowed you like warm water. I had tried it the first night. I had lain in the middle of it with my hands folded on my stomach and stared at the ceiling until the sun came up, listening to every board in the house settle and every wolf on patrol pass beneath the window, and when the sun finally came, I got up and slept on the floor.

Seven months later, I still slept on the floor.

Between the bed and the wall there was a gap just wide enough for my body. My back against the wall, my face toward the door. One blanket. The knife Kyra had given me as a joke on my second week home, “since you keep stealing them from the kitchen anyway,” under my rolled-up sweater that I used as a pillow.

Kyra thought I didn’t know she checked on me at night. I knew. I heard her bare feet stop outside my door every night around two, heard her breathe, heard her go away again. I never said anything. I didn’t know what you were supposed to say to a sister who had grown up without you and who checked to see if you were still there.

That morning, I woke to a scream.

My hand was on the knife before my eyes were open. I was on my knees with the blade out, heart going like a trapped bird, before my brain caught up and told me what I was hearing.

It wasn’t that kind of scream.

It was Ari. Ari, my brother’s Beta’s mate, who was loud about everything, screaming down the hall, “She’s awake! Mom! MOM! Bloom’s awake!”

And then the whole house was moving. Doors banging. Kace’s voice cracking on a sob. Kyra’s feet thundering down the hall past my door. Somewhere below, the front door slammed and a voice I knew better than my own heartbeat — even after sixteen years, even deeper and rougher than the boy I remembered — shouted my brother’s mate’s name like it was a prayer he’d been saying for four months.

I put the knife back under the sweater.

I sat on the floor with my knees pulled up and listened to my family be happy.

* * *

I should explain about Bloom.

I didn’t know her. That’s the first thing. I had seen her exactly once while she was awake, and I hadn’t been awake for it.

The day I came home, I was unconscious. I know the story the way you know a story about someone else, in pieces, from things people said when they thought I was asleep. A delta named Mike, who had turned traitor, found me in a rogue camp in the south and bought me, or stole me, or both. He brought me to the border of the Wolfsbane pack with a knife over my chest and he gave my brother a choice.

Your sister, or your mate.

My brother chose me.

He didn’t know Bloom was pregnant. I’ve heard him say that, late at night in the kitchen when he thought the house was asleep, to Xander, to Kace, to the walls. I didn’t know. He had found his sister after sixteen years and he traded a rogue girl he hadn’t marked yet to get her, and he didn’t know the rogue girl was carrying his children.

They got Bloom back. That’s how they always tell it in the pack, quickly, like ripping off a bandage. The Alpha got her back. But by then she had been held by a rogue for three months, and something had happened to her the night she escaped, and she had been asleep ever since. Four months in a bed in a white room on the ground floor of this house with a drip in her arm and my brother sitting beside her every evening at six o’clock exactly.

Everyone in the house loved her. I could tell from the way they said her name.

And every single one of them was too kind to say what I knew the pack said when they thought I couldn’t hear.

The Alpha sold his pregnant Luna for that.

I’d heard it two weeks ago, behind the training sheds. Two warriors cleaning their boots, not knowing I was cutting through the trees with a basket of washing. One of them had laughed, not cruel exactly, just tired. “Sixteen years searching and what does he get back? A girl who doesn’t talk and sleeps on the floor like a dog. The Alpha sold his pregnant Luna for that.”

I had kept walking. I’d hung the washing. I hadn’t dropped a single peg.

But I hadn’t forgotten it either. It had sat inside me since then like a stone in a shoe.

* * *

By noon the house had settled into a different kind of noise. The good kind. Kace was cooking enough food for forty people. Xander kept laughing at nothing. Ari had gone hoarse.

Bloom’s door was open.

I stood in the hallway outside it for a long time. Long enough that the soup Kace had pressed into my hands went cold.

Through the gap I could see the edge of the bed, the white blanket over the round mountain of her stomach, a tangle of red hair on the pillow. Red like mine. I had heard that, too. That they’d thought she might be me, at first, because of the hair.

My brother was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to the door. I could see his shoulders. They were shaking. Bloom’s small hand was on the back of his neck and she was saying something soft I couldn’t hear, and he was nodding into her shoulder like a boy.

I had not seen him cry. Not once in seven months. Not even the day I woke up in the clinic and said his name.

I stood in the hallway with cold soup in my hands and I understood something with a clarity that felt like being slapped.

He had been carrying this alone for four months. He had been carrying it for sixteen years before that. Searching for me. Raising a pack at twelve years old. And when he finally found me, finding me cost him this. Her. Them. Months of their lives they would never get back.

I did that. Not on purpose. I’d been unconscious. But I did it all the same, the way a flood does damage without meaning to.

And now she was awake, and they could finally start again, and the last thing they needed was the reason it had all happened standing in the doorway like a ghost.

Kyra came up behind me. I didn’t hear her. That’s how far away I was.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “You can go in. She asked about you.”

I flinched. I hated that I flinched. Kyra pretended not to notice, which was a kindness she had learned fast.

“She doesn’t know me,” I said.

“She knows about you.” Kyra took the cold soup out of my hands. “She asked if you were okay. First thing, practically. After the babies.”

Babies. Plural. I’d heard Ari say it through the wall weeks ago. Twins. My brother was going to be a father of twins.

“Later,” I said.

Kyra looked at me for a moment like she wanted to argue. Kyra always wanted to argue. Then she sighed and bumped her shoulder against mine, carefully, the way you’d touch a horse that kicks.

“Later,” she agreed. “I’ll save you pie.”

* * *

My wolf used to have a name.

I don’t think I ever told anyone that, after. When I was little, before, I used to lie in bed at night with my twin snoring across the room, and talk to the warm thing at the back of my mind that was going to be my wolf someday. She didn’t talk back yet. Wolves come at eighteen. But I could feel her there, curled up, sleeping, and I named her Ember, because when I closed my eyes she felt like the last coal in a fire. Small and red and stubborn.

The rogues who took me kept wolfsbane in everything. A little in the water. A little in the bread. Not enough to kill. Just enough to keep the Alpha’s red-haired girl from ever shifting and running home.

My eighteenth birthday came in a camp in the hills, in the rain, in a cage. I felt Ember wake up. One breath. One flare of heat at the back of my mind, like a spark landing on dry grass.

And then the wolfsbane put her out.

She’d been silent ever since. Ten years. The doctors in Wolfsbane had flushed my blood and said she might come back, with time. I didn’t ask them what would happen if she didn’t. I already knew what a wolf without a wolf was. A rogue, even inside a pack.

That night I sat on the floor of my room and tried to reach her, the way I did most nights. Reached into the dark at the back of my head for the coal.

Nothing. Cold ash.

Downstairs, someone was playing music. I heard my brother laugh, a real laugh, an unfamiliar sound. I heard Bloom laugh with him, tired and sweet.

I got up.

* * *

I didn’t take much. I’d learned not to.

A canvas bag. Bread and dried meat from the pantry, enough for four days if I was careful and six if I was used to being hungry, which I was. A water skin. The blanket off the floor. The knife.

I stood at the window in the dark and thought about leaving nothing. That was what a rogue would do. You don’t leave tracks.

But I wasn’t only a rogue. That was the problem. I was also a girl who had once had a twin brother who held her hand during thunderstorms, and that girl wouldn’t let me leave without a word.

I found a pencil in the desk drawer. Tore a page out of the back of a book Kace had lent me that I’d never managed to read.

I wrote: I’m leaving. Don’t bother looking for me.

I looked at it for a long time. It was cruel. I knew it was cruel. I didn’t know how to write the truth, which was: I’m leaving because I love you, and every time you look at me you see what it cost to get me back, and I can’t stand being the price of anything else.

So I left it cruel. Cruel was easier to forgive than the truth. Or that’s what I told myself.

I put the note on the pillow of the bed I’d never slept in.

The window opened without a sound. I’d oiled the hinges a month ago, not because I was planning anything. Just habit. You always know your exits.

The drop was nothing. The patrol was predictable — my brother’s warriors were good, but they were looking for things coming in, not going out. I went through the pines barefoot, the way I’d learned, toes first, weight soft, and when I reached the border marker on the old oak, I stopped.

I could still hear the music. Faint, through the trees.

I put my hand on the bark of the oak. On the other side was nothing. No pack, no brother, no bed I couldn’t sleep in, no eyes full of love and guilt following me around every room.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to nobody. To him.

Then I crossed.

* * *

I ran north for four days.

I didn’t have a plan beyond away. I followed rivers because rivers hide scent. I slept in the forks of trees and under fallen logs and once in a hollow beneath a rock ledge where something had died a long time ago. I ate the bread on the first day and the meat on the second and then I ate what I could find, because finding food was the one thing sixteen years had made me good at.

On the third day it rained. On the fourth day my feet started bleeding through the calluses, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt my toes, and the forest changed.

I noticed it in my nose first. Wolfsbane country smelled like warm pine and river clay. This was colder. Sharper. Pine still, but darker, mixed with woodsmoke and something faintly sweet.

There were markings on the trees. Fresh ones. Claw marks at shoulder height, a warning any wolf would understand.

Pack land.

Every instinct I owned told me to turn around.

But my legs had stopped listening to instinct somewhere around midday. I staggered down a slope toward the sound of water, caught myself on a birch, missed the next one. The ground came up very fast. River stones. Cold water soaking through my knees.

I lay there with my cheek against a wet rock and thought, very calmly, that this was a stupid place to die. Wolfsbane Alpha’s long-lost sister, found facedown in a stranger’s river. Mike would have laughed.

Behind me, in the trees, something growled.

It was low, and deep, and it went right through the river stones into my bones.

I knew that kind of growl. Every rogue does.

That wasn’t a patrol.

That was an Alpha.