I Hid My Supreme Rank, Regret of the Pack novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Tea

Her mother pushes the bitter tea at dawn and her brother blocks the door. Cassandra walks out, and at the pack border her wolf speaks for the first time.

I didn't drink the tea that night, and I didn't drink it at dawn.

I had packed one duffel bag in the dark and set it by my door.

At six I came down to the kitchen with it over my shoulder.

Mom was already standing at the stove with the little white cup.

"You're up early," she said. "Sit. I made it fresh."

"I'm not thirsty."

"It isn't for thirst, Cassandra. It's for your nerves."

"My nerves are fine."

She held the cup out to me and smiled.

It was the same smile she had used every morning for eighteen years.

"Humor me."

I looked at the steam coming off it.

I thought of Bea, who had never been handed a cup in her life.

I took it from my mother's hand, walked to the sink, and poured it down the drain.

The kitchen went very quiet.

My mother's smile stayed exactly where it was. Her hand did not move from the air where the cup had been.

"That was rude," she said softly.

"I know."

"Where are you going with that bag?"

"South."

"There's nothing south of here but Redwater."

"There's Cinderfall Academy," I said. "I was accepted last night."

She stared at me for a long moment.

Then she set down the teapot very carefully.

"Dunstan," she called. Her voice was calm. "Come down here, please."

My brother came down the stairs in his socks, rubbing his jaw.

"What?"

"Your sister thinks she's going to Cinderfall."

He laughed.

"Cinderfall takes one in three hundred. They don't take girls who read their own results aloud at Application Night."

"They took me."

"Show me."

I took out my phone and held up the reply.

He read it. His face changed at the word Supreme, and then it changed back.

"It's a scam," he said. "Somebody saw your score posted and sent you a fake letter."

"It came to my address from the Territory registrar."

"Then they made a mistake."

He took the phone out of my hand and slid it into his back pocket.

"Give it back."

"You're tired, Cassie. You've been tired since you were a kid. Go back to bed."

"I'm not tired."

I was, though. I had been tired every day of my life, and I had never told anyone, because Bea ran farther than me and slept less and never once looked worn out.

I took the duffel and stepped toward the door.

Dunstan was already in front of it.

He was a head taller than me and twice as wide.

"Move," I said.

"No."

"Dad!" I called.

My father was sitting at the end of the long table in his reading chair, with the paper unfolded. He had been sitting there the whole time.

He didn't lower it.

"Listen to your mother, Cassie," he said.

That was all.

I had spent eighteen years waiting for that man to look up from a newspaper.

I stopped waiting.

I put my shoulder into my brother's ribs, hard, and when he bent over I slipped around him and went out the back door.

He grabbed my duffel strap.

I let go of the bag.

I ran with only my jacket and my keys and the little wallet in my back pocket, across the yard and down the gravel road toward the pack border.

Nobody followed me.

I didn't understand that until I was halfway there.

They thought I would come back.

They thought I always came back.

The boundary stones stood where the pines opened onto the highway, grey and knee-high, with the pack's mark carved into each one.

I had crossed them a thousand times.

When I stepped between the last two, they hummed.

It was a low note, deep in the stone.

My knees almost gave way.

Something I had never felt before turned over inside my chest, slow and enormous, and opened its eyes.

A voice that was not mine said, very clearly, in the back of my head:

"Finally."

I stood there on the shoulder of the highway, shaking.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"You know who I am," the voice said. "I've been asleep a very long time, and not by my own choice."

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