What I'm Owed

"One hour," Cassian said, at the edge of the pack lands, where his escort had agreed — grudgingly, at Torren's insistence — to let me collect what was mine before we rode north. "I'd give you the day. Blackpine's alpha would rather you not have it."

"An hour's enough," I said. "I don't own much."

Something moved behind his silver eyes when I said that. He didn't comment on it. I was starting to learn that was its own kind of comment.

My room was in the omega house, third door, no lock on the inside — a detail I'd stopped noticing was strange around age nine. I packed fast: two dresses that weren't the gray ceremony one, a hairbrush with half its teeth gone, a stone from the creek bed I'd kept since I was seven for reasons I'd never once tried to explain to anyone, because no one had ever asked.

I left the ceremony dress on the floor where I'd stepped out of it. I left the door open. I left nothing folded.

I was tying off my one bag when the floorboard by the window creaked, and I knew it was him before I turned around, the way you know weather is coming before the sky changes — some old animal part of my body that had spent nine years learning Kane Blackpine's weight on wood floors, back when I'd thought that meant something.

"You shouldn't be here," I said, not turning around yet.

"It's still Blackpine land for another forty minutes." His voice had none of the ceremony steel in it now. "I checked."

"You checked how long you had before I stopped being your problem." I turned. He looked worse than he had in the chamber — the arithmetic still running behind his eyes, coming out somewhere he didn't like. "That's very you, Kane."

"That's not—" He stopped. Started again. "I came to say I'm sorry."

"For which part." I kept packing. "The rejecting, the doing it in front of five hundred people, or the eighteen years before that where sorry would've actually cost you something?"

He didn't have an answer fast enough, and the gap where it should have been told me everything Maren's rule had been built to protect me from feeling in a room full of strangers. Here, alone, with no audience, I let it land. Just once. Just on him.

"I was going to be alpha," he said finally. "My father said a bond to a wolfless girl would—"

"I know what your father said. I've known what your father said since I was nine and old enough to understand why nobody let me sit at the good table." I zipped the bag. "You didn't come here to apologize, Kane. You came to find out if it still hurts. That's not the same thing."

He flinched like I'd hit him, which was interesting, because it was the first time in nine years he'd flinched at anything I'd said instead of the other way around.

"Does it?" he asked. Quiet. Actually asking.

I thought about lying. I thought about how satisfying a lie would taste right now, how easy it would be to hand him back one clean wound to carry out of this room the way he'd handed me a thousand small ones over nine years.

I told him the truth instead, because the truth was worse for him and I'd earned the right to be that specific.

"No," I said. "It doesn't. Not anymore. Somewhere between the ceremony ground and that council chamber it just — stopped. And I think that's going to bother you a lot longer than it bothered me, Kane, because at least I get to walk out of here into something. You get to stand in Blackpine and wonder, every single day, what exactly you traded a crown for."

I picked up my bag and walked past him, close enough to smell cedar-smoke and old grief on him, and didn't stop.

The escort was mounted and waiting at the gate. Cassian on his black horse at the front of it, watching me cross the yard with an expression I couldn't read yet and would spend the next several weeks learning to.

Kane caught up to me at the gatepost. Last chance, and he knew it.

"You're really leaving with him," he said. Not a question either, same as wolfless hadn't been a question from Maren — just a fact he was still trying to get his mouth to accept.

I stopped. Looked back at the pack that had raised me on last helpings and locked doors that didn't lock and nine years of a word I was never going to let land on me again.

"I was never staying for you," I said.

I didn't look back a second time. I didn't need to. Cassian brought his horse alongside mine at the gate without a word, and somewhere behind us I heard Kane Blackpine standing very still in a yard that was about to feel a great deal smaller than it used to.

To be continued — Chapter 4: The road north is three days long, and somewhere on the second one, the King stops sounding like a king.