Chapter 5

Keal's POV

She came back to me through that sea of stunned faces like a queen walking through the ruins of a kingdom she'd just decided to burn.

I'd been alive a very long time. Longer than most of the stone this house was built on. And still, I could not remember the last time a mortal surprised me the way this little wolf kept doing. I'd expected tears at the party. Maybe shouting. What I got instead was a woman who cut her own family down to the bone with sharp, quiet sentences and then walked off before the bodies hit the floor.

Delicious.

I leaned against a marble pillar and let the room churn around me. So much guilt in the air tonight, thick enough to taste. Mortals were always at their finest when they'd been caught, and this whole gilded pack had just been caught red-handed by the very girl they'd buried alive.

They couldn't stop staring at her. They couldn't stop staring at me either, all of them chewing on the same question. "Who is he? Where did he come from? How is he standing beside a dead girl?"

Let them wonder.

I'd waited a long time in the dark for a soul like hers. The furious ones were always the best bargains. The grieving came to me quiet and grey, but the angry ones lit up the whole world on their way down, and I got to warm my hands at the fire. How amusing.

She was my last. The final key. One more soul carried home to the Abyss, and my dear mother would have no choice left but to open that door and let me walk free after all these centuries.

But freedom could wait one night. A show like this was far too rare to rush.

A nervous young woman with a clipboard was drifting through the crowd, murmuring about the orphanage fund, the little charity the Brickstones had bottled onto the evening to look generous. I lifted one finger, and she came hurrying over.

"The orphanage," I said. "How much has the room raised so far?"

"Fifty thousand dollars," She told me. A proud number, for these people.

I named one twenty times larger.

The clipboard nearly slipped from her hands. Around us the whisper caught and spread like fire through dry grass. I let them burn with it. Let them chew on the stranger who tossed away a fortune like a man flicking away ash.

Then the auctioneer climbed onto the little platform, flustered, trying to drag the evening back onto its rails. "And now, a tradition. The bride-to-be's bouquet. Who will open the bidding?"

Someone shouted, "Hundred dollars!"

"One-fifty," another giggled.

"Two-fifty," a third offered.

I had no idea why they were trying to buy a flower, but since it was their tradition, I watched and waited as the price drove higher.

The bid finally ended at five hundred dollars, and the auctioneer was about to hit his bell, when I raised my hand and said a number ten times the final bid.

"Five thousand dollars."

The figure I called silenced the entire hall.

The auctioneer stammered, then waved for the flowers to be brought to me. And here was the sweet part, the bouquet sat in Pamela's own hands. Which meant Pamela herself would have to carry it the long way across that silent floor and place it into the palms of the one who bought her flowers.

So I told them to give the flowers to Reva instead. The very sister she'd left to rot in a hospital bed.

Pamela stiffened, but yet she started walking.

I watched her walk. Every step looked like it cost her something she couldn't spare. Her face was pale, her jaw locked tight, and when she reached us she thrust the flowers at Reva without a word.

Reva took them.

She looked down at the white roses, then up at her sister, and she smiled. Slow. Cold. A smile with a blade folded inside it.

Then she opened her fingers and let the bouquet fall to the floor.

She set her heel on it and pressed down. Stomping and twisting. She ground the petals into the stone until there was nothing left but a green and white mess under her shoe.

The whole room flinched as one.

Her mother pressed a hand over her mouth. Her father's face went a deep and furious red. Pamela stared down at the wreckage of her own flowers like she couldn't understand what had just happened to her perfect, gilded night.

And me?

I laughed. Right there in the middle of all that horrified silence, I threw my head back and laughed. The sound rolled out across the hall and made them flinch a second time.

My clever, vicious little wolf. She'd shaken hands with the devil and didn't know it yet. She had no idea what waited for her when her ninety days ran dry, no idea that the same hand guiding her through her revenge would one day close around her soul and carry it down into the cold and dark forever.

She should have terrified me a little, if I'm honest. Souls like hers didn't come along often, and the ones that did had a way of causing trouble on their way to the grave. A wiser being might have collected her quickly and gone home.

But watching her stand unbroken in that room, grinding their cruelty under her heel while an entire pack trembled, I found I was in no hurry at all.

The Abyss had held me for three hundred years. What was ninety more days? It would pass faster than I could blink.

I pushed off the pillar, crossed to her, and I offered her my arm again. She took it without looking away from the family she'd just brought to their knees.

"You," I murmured, low enough for only her, "are going to be the most fun I've had in a very long time."

"Good," she said. "Then help me finish it."

Oh, I intended to.

Let the games begin.