been gnawed by the Alpha so he would wander alone for eternity. Dog, Tiberius had said, spitting less symbolically, followed by a forceful kick to the spleen.
“Some of the Alphas followed his”—he spits again—“lead. Poul was one.”
A dark-red stain seeps across my vision, watching the 10th’s Alpha hovering around her, his nose to the face I have held in my hands. His cheek near the ear that has heard my whispered groans. His chin to the velvet mouth that I have tasted.
His very presence marking her like one of the hundreds of No Trespassing signs ringing Homelands, because he is a strong wolf and would fight off any other males who might be interested.
The whole Pack sees him, and everyone knows he sided with the shit who planned to take over the Pack once August’s hunters tore its heart out. Tore her out. But the Alpha doesn’t flinch as his breath touches her hair.
The membrane covering my eyes ripples in time with the hollow lapping at the walls of my skull. I stumble over the bench, out the door, down the sloping lawn, and to the solace of water that shimmers bright and colorless as mercury.
I stretch out, letting my back absorb heat from planks that have been warmed by the sun and textured by wolf claws, bending my arm to protect my eyes from the too-transparent sky and overly bright sun. The variety of calls that bounded across Homelands when I first came here has quieted. Now it’s just the hollow thocking of a woodpecker.
Wolves are nearby. I can’t see them or hear them, but I feel them watching from the cool and subtle forest. Before I can ask what they’re looking for, a tremor runs from the soil into the timbers of the dock with a heedless thumping louder than that of even the biggest wolf.
“Cassius.” I don’t move the arm bent across my eyes.
He sits next to me.
“I’m not doing that again,” he says.
I recognize an opening salvo for what it is and say nothing, hoping he’ll go away.
A boat bumps against the side of the Boathouse.
“I hear you swum all the way to the other side,” he says conversationally, trying another tack.
“Swam,” I answer less conversationally.
Just because I have my arm cocked over my eyes doesn’t mean I don’t catch the way his eyes narrow and his jaw tightens. Or the way he manages to corral the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth into a smile. “That’s right, ‘swam.’ I hear you swam all the way to the other side.”
Something disturbs the water, sending minute waves into the water plants at the edge. What do you want, Cassius? What is so important that you would let me chide you like that?
“Did you hear the cars?”
The bells that had been chiming are now warning tocsins that race across the landscape of my brain. I think about those last meters I swam, Evie’s head against my shoulder, pretending she needed to be rescued though we both knew she didn’t. Did I hear the road? I have no idea. It was the last thing on my mind.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t make it that far. And just so you know, I’ve seen you swim. There’s no way in hell you could make it that distance, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He stills for a long time, staring out over the water, then the wood creaks and he leans in close enough for me to feel his breath. “Just so you know, you’re not one of them. You never will be,” he says, his tone quiet and petty.
My fingers feel the splintering planks of the dock. I’ll measure it tomorrow. Tell Sten we need to fix it.
“What do you want, Cassius?”
He knows I meant it rhetorically, but he answers it anyway.
“I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’d hate to see you humiliated when you find out that the Alpha has no interest in you beyond the fact that you look like her dead husband.”
“What?”
“I heard Elijah say it. When he thought I wasn’t listening.” Cassius’s malevolence grows once he sees he’s fingered a sore spot. “He said you look more like him than ever. Now that you have the beard.”
I touch the edge of my lip.
For winter, she’d said.
I don’t know when Cassius left. I only notice the hole left by the absence of the watchers in the woods.
* * *
I’m jealous of a dead man. Did he really look like me? Or rather, do I really look