Chapter 3 A Place Among Wolves

• She woke to lamplight and clean linen and a face she did not know, watching her with a worry too raw to be simple. For a long moment she did not trust it. Kindness, in her experience, was usually the opening move of something worse, and she braced herself out of old habit before her mind had even caught up to where she was.
• "Where," she started, and her voice broke on the single word, dry and cracked from days of screaming into a forest that had not answered.
• "You're safe. You're in the Everleigh pack house," Julian said, leaning forward, careful to keep his hands where she could see them, careful with his voice the way you'd be careful with a wild animal that had already been hurt enough by careless hands. "I found you in the forest. What's your name?"
• "Aria," she whispered, and then, because his eyes did not move away from hers, because no one had looked at her like that in longer than she could remember, like she was a person and not a problem or a body or a thing to be used, the rest of it came out in a flood she could not stop, words tumbling over each other faster than she meant to let them. Her master, a wolf from a rough border pack who had wanted more from her than a servant owed and had stopped bothering to ask once he understood no one would question him for taking it anyway. His hands on her before she had a chance to run. The refusal that had cost her everything she had left, which by then was not much. The men he'd sent to drag her into the woods and leave her tied where the wolves, the real, wild, unclaimed kind, would finish what he hadn't managed to finish himself.
• Julian's jaw tightened with every sentence until it looked carved from stone, and beneath his skin his wolf paced and snarled, low enough that only he could feel it, claws pressing at the backs of his own fingers as if his body wanted, badly, to go find this man and finish something of its own. "He will answer for that," he said quietly, when she finally ran out of words, "one day. I promise you that."
• "I have nowhere to go," Aria said, and hated how small her voice sounded, hated that after everything, this was still the part that made her want to cry.
• "Then stay," Julian said, before he had fully thought it through, the offer out of his mouth before his own better judgment could catch up and remind him he was not supposed to be making promises like that to a stranger he'd known for less than an hour. "Work in the pack house. You'll have a roof and food and no one will ever raise a hand to you again while I'm alive to stop it."
• He did not tell her about the pull in his own chest, sharper now that she was awake and looking at him, a low warm ache that had nothing to do with pity and everything to do with the way his wolf kept trying to press closer to the surface, wanting to be near her, wanting it so badly it frightened him a little, this feeling that had arrived without asking permission and clearly did not intend to leave again.
• King Edmund, when his son brought the request to him that evening, studied Aria's downcast eyes and steady hands, the careful way she held herself like someone used to making herself smaller than she was, and though he could not smell a wolf on her at all, only warm human blood, ordinary and unremarkable in every way his nose could measure, he saw nothing in her worth turning away. "Give the girl a dress and a room with the pack's other maids," he said, in the voice he used for decisions he did not intend to revisit. "Everleigh has never turned away someone who only wants to work honestly for her bread, wolf or not, and I will not start now over a girl half starved and half killed by someone else's cruelty."
• The next morning Aria stood in the maids' quarters in a plain wool dress that still smelled of cedar from the chest it had been folded in, turning her wrists over in the morning light to check, out of some old habit, that the rope marks were healing and not turning bad. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she let herself believe the day ahead of her might not hurt, and that belief alone, small and fragile as it was, felt like more than she had been given in years.
• She did not know yet what it meant, in a pack of wolves, to carry a faint crescent mark on the inside of her wrist that had not been there before the forest, silver and delicate as a hairline crack in glass. She only knew that when Prince Julian's eyes had found hers across the room the day before, something in her had gone quiet and certain in a way nothing had in years, the way a bird goes quiet when it finally finds a branch that will hold its weight, and that she had spent the whole night since half wondering, half hoping, that she would see those eyes again today.