Chapter 5

"You hit me? Did you even *see* what just happened?! She grabbed my —"

"Enough!"

Caden's voice drops into Beta tone — the heavy pressure of it slamming out toward me on instinct. It glances right off. My Alpha bloodline doesn't bend for a Beta. But the part of me that loved him for fifteen years still cracks straight down the middle.

His face is gray. His eyes are colder than I've ever seen them.

"Your whole life you've been like this. Throwing your weight around because you're Alpha Quinn's only bloodline heir. I told myself you'd grow out of it. I told myself you weren't really cruel."

"Now you can't even leave your own sister alone."

"You and Mira were raised in the same pack, by the same parents — she gives everything she has for this pack, and you? You're rotten with envy."

"I don't know who poisoned you into this. I think your mother died from the shame of having a pup like —"

A crack splits the corridor.

I don't remember moving. I don't remember lifting my hand. My palm just goes off across his face like a bullet.

He turns his head with the force of it. Slow. He doesn't even raise a hand to his cheek. A thin line of blood splits his lower lip and runs down to his chin.

Behind him Mira is making a thin pitchy noise — *Caden, Caden, your face* — like she's been shot.

I'm panting. My eyes are burning. The grass wolf in my jacket pocket is digging into my ribs.

Eight years of mating, last life. Eight years of him screaming things at me across that dinner table. He called me selfish. He called me jealous. He called me a curse.

But not *that*. Not my mother. He never crossed that line.

This life he crossed it in three days.

"The wolf in this corridor with the least right to say a single word about my mother," I say, and my voice is shaking so hard I can barely shape the words, "is *you*."

I turn around. The small of my back is already swelling — I can feel it pulsing under my shirt — and I have to grip the wall to walk straight.

I get maybe four steps.

Then I hear him move. Fast. The kind of fast wolves move when they finally feel something.

He scoops me up off the floor before I can swing at him.

"Put me down."

He doesn't.

"Caden — *put me down* —"

Behind him I hear Mira's small wet voice.

"Caden, I — I never meant for —"

He doesn't even turn his head for her. He just walks. Long strides, jaw locked, carrying me down the corridor toward the healer's wing like a wolf carrying his own dying mate.

For one second — one stupid, stupid second — my chest cracks open with old hope.

Then I remember.

Last life he carried me like this exactly twice. Once after a rogue raid where I almost lost a leg. Once after a training accident at the academy. Both times I told myself *see, he loves me, he just doesn't know it yet.*

Both times he set me down on a healer's cot and left without a word and went to find Mira.

I close my eyes.

The healer's wing smells like crushed wolfsbane and bandages. He lays me down on the cot, steps back, and stands at the doorway like a sentry while the healer works on my back.

The healer asks who did it.

"I fell," I say.

The healer looks at Caden. Caden's hands are fists at his sides.

After she leaves, he stays at the door.

"I didn't mean —"

"Get out."

"Rae, what I said about your mother —"

"Get out, Caden."

I roll over to face the wall and pull the blanket up to my ears.

He doesn't move for a long time. Then I hear the door click softly behind him.

Half a minute later, from out in the corridor, I hear the *crack* of a palm on a face.

He just slapped himself. Hard.

Last life he did that too. Once. After he'd called me a worthless she-wolf in front of half the pack. He stood outside our bedroom and slapped his own face raw and then knelt at our door for two hours.

I didn't open it then either.

I close my eyes.

*Caden Wolfe, you ran out of chances eight years before I was born.*