They Forgot My Awakening, So I Took the Pack novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: No Touching Interns

Katja arrives at Blackthorn house in Highmere, meets its one rule and a hostile fellow intern, and gets a message from her father calling her a runaway and a liar.

We reached Highmere at sunrise, and I had not slept.

Blackthorn house sat on a hill above the river, black stone and tall windows, with a silver pin carved over the door.

Corwin parked in the courtyard and came around to open my door.

"Welcome to Blackthorn," he said. "You get a room, three meals and a wolf who will run you into the ground. Everything else, you earn."

"What's the rule?" I asked. "Every pack has one."

He looked at me for a second before he answered.

"The Alpha does not touch the interns. Ever. It's written on the wall of the training hall, and it's the only rule I've never had to repeat."

"Understood," I said.

"Good."

He held out his hand to shake on it, out of habit, I think, or politeness.

I took it.

A jolt ran from my palm up to my shoulder and straight down my spine, hot and sharp, and my wolf rolled over inside me, wide awake.

Corwin let go so fast that my hand hung in the air.

He stepped back and shoved both of his into his coat pockets.

"Static," he said. "Cold mornings do that."

I looked at the courtyard, at the frost on the stones, and I did not point out that it was nowhere near cold enough to spark.

"Static," I agreed.

A young man was waiting at the top of the steps with a clipboard and a cup of coffee.

He had a shaved head and a gym bag over one shoulder, and he looked me up and down once.

"So this is the new intern," he said. "The Pinewatch leftover."

"Be nice," Corwin said.

"I'm always nice. Welcome, Pinewatch. I've been here a year, and I'm the only one the Alpha hasn't thrown across the training hall." He grinned. "Yet."

"You've been warned about that grin," Corwin said, and went inside.

I followed him in, in my ceremony dress, with nothing else of mine.

The other intern took me up two flights of stairs and opened the door of a room with a bed, a desk and a window that faced the river.

"Training clothes are on the bed, grey, your size. Bathroom's on the left. Breakfast in forty minutes. Don't be late and don't talk about your family at the table, because everyone here already knows."

"Everyone knows what?"

"That your own pack tried to say you were nothing." He shrugged. "Alpha Strake told us last night. Blackthorn doesn't hide things from its own."

He left, and I sat down on the bed and held on to the quilt.

I had been in the house for ten minutes, and strangers already knew what my family had done to me.

My phone buzzed against my thigh.

It was Odette.

I'm sorry. I didn't know it was like that. I didn't know you went in.

I read it twice and put the phone face down on the desk.

Then I picked it up and typed: You stood three feet from me for an hour.

I deleted it.

I typed: I know.

I deleted that too.

I took a shower in the little white bathroom, and I let the water run until it ran cold.

In the mirror, my eyes looked silver, the way they had in the trial room.

They had never been silver before today.

At breakfast the table seated sixteen, and every one of them watched me sit down.

Corwin was at the head, reading a folder, and he did not look up.

A woman with grey hair set a plate of eggs in front of me and said, "Eat everything, child. You'll need it."

Nobody said a word about Pinewatch.

Nobody asked what my rank was.

They passed me the salt and the butter and talked about the weather.

I had not known how much I wanted that until it happened.

I was finishing the last of my toast when every phone at the table buzzed at once.

The grey-haired woman picked hers up and went white.

"Alpha," she said.

Corwin lifted his head.

She turned her phone around, and he read it, and I watched his jaw tighten.

"What is it?" I said.

He didn't answer, so the young man with the shaved head leaned over and read it aloud, in a flat voice.

"From the Alpha of Pinewatch, to all packs. 'Katja Hallam has run away from her family under a false claim. She is unstable, she has lied about her rank, and she is in the custody of a pack that has no right to her. Any pack that shelters her will answer to Pinewatch.'"

Nobody moved.

My toast was still in my hand.

My own father had sent that message, to every Alpha in the country, before breakfast.

He had written my name in it.

"Unstable," I said.

"It's a clumsy lie," the young man said.

"It's a public one," said Corwin.

He put down the folder and looked straight at me, for the first time since the courtyard.

"Finish your breakfast, Katja," he said. "Then we'll start your training."

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