Chapter 4: Three Mornings

The black envelope sat on my brother's dresser with its wax unbroken.

Twenty-one days to the full moon, and I still had no idea how a woman with no wolf stood up in front of a council.

I looked at it every night before I turned out the light, and I did not open it.

On the third morning without Gilbert's tea, I woke up and could hear my brother's neighbor making coffee through two walls.

I lay still on the spare bed and listened.

A spoon against a mug.

A kettle clicking off.

Someone's shower running three floors down.

For six years the world had been a little muffled, and I had never noticed.

I got up and put my face to the window, and I could smell the street.

Rain on hot pavement.

Bread from the bakery on the corner.

A dog with a cold, somewhere below.

My wolf stretched inside me for the first time since my wedding day.

She wasn't angry.

She was awake.

I stood there holding the windowsill until my hands stopped trembling.

My headaches had stopped on the first day.

That was the thing I kept coming back to.

I had called them stress for six years.

Someone knocked on the front door, and I heard my brother's chair scrape in the kitchen.

I knew who it was before the latch turned.

I didn't know how I knew.

"Morning," my brother said. "She's up."

Dalton Reeve stepped into the hall.

He was holding a paper bag from the bakery and wearing the dark wool coat from the banquet.

And the world went sideways.

It hit me from my feet up.

Pine smoke and cold air and something warm underneath, a smell I had never once noticed in all the years I'd known him.

My knees went.

I caught the doorframe, and my wolf surged against my ribs so hard I thought she would split me open.

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