Pam doesn’t answer, and Darius makes another sound beside me. Low and guttural, barely human.
“What did he tell you, Pam? What did he say to get Blue to leave?”
“First of all, he said her name isn’t even Blue. Can you believe that? She’s been lying to you all since the beginning. Her real name is Moira, and she abandoned her pack, just ran off without a word. He said he just wanted to talk to her, reconnect, and find out why she left. He said he had important information for her.”
“What information?”
Pam hesitates. “That her sister is alive.”
Sophie. The one Blue told us about in the kitchen.
40
Mo
Icome to, and dread fills my body as we approach the old pack compound.
The trail curves south around a ridge I used to climb as a kid, back when climbing things was fun and not a survival skill. The stream below it is the same one where Sophie and I caught tadpoles. I know these hills. I know the way the trees change from pine to birch as the valley opens up. I know this land, even when it’s changed so much that I almost don’t recognize it.
Home. Or what used to be home.
The compound comes into view, and my stomach drops because it’s the same place, and it isn’t. The bones are the same. The main hall where we used to eat together, the row of cottages along the eastern ridge, and the clearing where the kids played. But everything has been stripped bare. The communal garden my mother tended is gone, replaced by a dirt yard. The cottages look neglected—paint peeling, windows dark. High fencing hasbeen added around the perimeter, with guard posts at the corners.
It wasn’t always like this. I remember when this compound was full of noise and laughter. When the alpha who led us was tough but fair, and the pack felt like family. That was before the challenge. Before the new alpha showed up with his men and took over, and turned everything rotten. I was eleven. Sophie was fourteen. Overnight, the place we grew up in became somewhere we had to survive.
And I’m dragged by one of the males and the boy who used me to win a bet and upend my life, leading the way.
We pass through the main gate. The guards nod us through, and their eyes slide to me, appraising, smirking, and I want to rip those eyes out of their skulls.
The few people I can see move with their heads down. Shoulders hunched, eyes on the ground. I recognize some of them. Faces from my childhood, older now, hollowed out. Nobody meets my eyes.
Stuart leads me to the main hall. The same building where we used to eat together, where Sophie and I sat on the floor and listened to stories when we were small. The door is heavier now. Reinforced.
“Where’s my sister?”
“Inside.”
The door opens, and I walk in.
The head alpha is sitting behind a desk. I recognize him immediately. Older, greyer, thicker through the shoulders, but the same man. The same cold eyes. The one who challenged our alpha and won, and started taking everything apart—the one who crushed Sophie’s throat. The one who mutilated my body and locked me in a cell for weeks, then sold me to the highest bidder.
He looks at me the way you look at a missing piece of inventory that’s been returned.
“So,” he says. “The omega who cost me a fortune. You’re smaller than I remember.”
“And you’re exactly the piece of shit I remember,” I say. “Where’s Sophie?” I demand.
He tilts his head. A small shadow from the side of the room moves toward him.
She stops beside his desk. Hands clasped in front of her. Head slightly bowed. She’s wearing a grey dress that hangs off her frame because there isn’t enough of her to fill it. Her wrists are narrow and scarred, the marks of cuffs worn for years.
But it’s her eyes that destroy me.
She looks at me. Looks right at me. And there’s nothing there. No recognition. No surprise. No joy or fear, or anger. Her eyes are flat and distant, the eyes of someone who left a long time ago and forgot to take their body with them. She looks at me the way she’d look at the wall.
“Sophie.” My voice breaks on her name. Three years of carrying her ghost, and she’s ten feet away from me, and she doesn’t know who I am.
Nothing. A slight tilt of her head. Her brow furrows, barely, like she’s trying to place a sound from a long time ago.