Chapter 5 The Wolf Who Hated Moonlight

• Ivy told herself, at first, that it was nothing. A maid, singing. A passing fancy of her father's, of the villagers, of a pack starved for something new to talk about after a quiet season. It would fade, the way every new thing eventually faded once the pack found something else to gossip over.
• It did not fade. It grew.
• She began to find reasons to dislike Aria the way a person scratches a healing wound, not because there is anything worth finding underneath, but because the scratching itself feels like relief, a small ugly comfort that costs nothing until it costs everything. She accused Aria of stealing a silver hairpin that turned up, two days later, exactly where Ivy had left it, tucked behind her own washbasin the whole time. She told the head housekeeper that Aria had bared her throat disrespectfully to a visiting Alpha's wife, a claim so plainly false, so easily disproven by three separate maids who had been in the room, that the housekeeper simply apologized to Ivy and said nothing more of it, her eyes carrying an apology of a different kind, the kind that says I don't believe you but I know better than to say so to your face.
• No one believed her. That was the unbearable part. Not the lies failing, but the way wolves' eyes slid past her when she told them, patient and unsurprised, the way you look at a pup you have stopped expecting the truth from, a look that hurt worse than an argument would have, because you cannot argue with a look.
• "Everyone loves her," Ivy said to Rosalind one evening, pacing the length of her chamber, her weak wolf pacing under her skin in the same restless circle, back and forth, back and forth, wearing a groove in the floor of her own chest. "My father. The villagers. My own brother follows her around like she is the only scent left in the world worth tracking."
• "Does he?" Rosalind asked, very carefully, folding her hands in her lap, her own wolf going still and quiet the way it always did when Julian's name came up in the room, an old habit of hiding that she had never quite been able to unlearn.
• "You've seen it. Don't pretend you haven't." Ivy stopped pacing, turned on her, something raw and unguarded in her face for just a moment before the mask came back down. "Tell me I'm not imagining it."
• Rosalind said nothing, which was its own kind of answer, and Ivy took it as confirmation and hated her a little for it, though she never let that show either.
• Ivy caught Julian in the garden the next afternoon and asked him outright, watching his face the way a hunter watches a trapped animal, watching for the flicker of gold in his eyes that would give him away before his mouth ever could, because she had grown up beside him long enough to know exactly what his wolf looked like when it surfaced without permission.
• "Do you love her?"
• "She's a maid," Julian said, too quickly, and looked away first, the words coming out clipped and defensive in a way that told her more than a longer answer would have.
• It was the looking away that told her the truth before he did, and the faint gold flare in his eyes he could not quite smother, there and gone in half a second, told her the rest. And later that night, alone in his own room, Julian found himself turning the question over and over, unable to let it go the way he usually let his sister's provocations go. Why his wolf went quiet and content only in her presence, when it had never gone fully quiet for anyone before, not even during the long calm stretches of an ordinary good day. Why her laugh in the corridor made something in his chest go warm and light in a way that felt almost embarrassing to admit, even to himself, alone in the dark. Why the thought of anyone raising a hand to her again made his claws want to come out on their own, an anger he did not entirely trust because it felt bigger than the situation warranted, bigger than simple protectiveness toward a maid in his father's household, until he had to admit that his sister had asked the one question he had been too afraid to ask himself, and that his own wolf had already answered it weeks ago without waiting for his permission.
• He pressed his thumb to the inside of his own wrist that night, remembering the mark he'd felt beneath his fingers the day he carried Aria out of the forest, faint under her torn sleeve, and wondered, with a mixture of hope and dread he did not have a name for, whether a bond like that could exist between a wolf and a girl with no wolf of her own at all, and if it could, what in the old world it would mean for a prince who was supposed to marry strength, to marry alliance, to marry anything but a maid with no pack behind her name.