Chapter 7 The Poison And The Hound

• "A maid," Ivy said, and the word came out of her like something spat onto the floor. "My brother, heir to Everleigh, true Alpha born, mated to a maid. Not even a wolf. Her. The one creature in this pack house I cannot stand to breathe the same air as, and now I am meant to bow to her at supper for the rest of my life."
• Rosalind, sitting very still on the edge of the bed, said nothing, because she had learned there was no version of comfort Ivy would accept tonight, not gentle, not honest, not anything at all.
• "She has everything," Ivy went on, pacing, her weak wolf clawing under her skin with a restlessness that never used to frighten her and now did, a feeling like something trying to claw its way out through her ribs. "My father's affection. My brother's bond, a thing older than the pack itself, apparently, a thing I didn't even know could choose a human until it chose her. The love of an entire pack that has never once looked at me the way they look at her, and I was born with the blood in my veins and she was born with nothing at all, nothing, and somehow the world decided that made her the more deserving one. Tell me how that is fair. Tell me one single way that is fair."