Chapter 2

Wren's POV

Tobias looked at me like I'd just told him the sky wasn't actually blue. He set the dish towel down harder than he needed to, knuckling white around the edge of the counter.

"You're really about to let this slide again, Wren? Have some respect for yourself. That woman isn't here for coffee. She's hunting. She brings in some new nobody every few weeks just to watch him ruin your morning in front of a full house. How much of this are you supposed to just absorb?"

Something ugly churned in my chest half humiliation, half the low, steady hum of pain still radiating along my jaw.

"You think I want to let her win?" I snapped, quieter than I meant to, because raising my voice cost energy I didn't have left. "You think this is fun for me, Tobias? She has her father behind her. Total, unshakable backing. Garrick doesn't just run Court security he runs what's left of everyone's life underneath him. If I'm the reason his daughter's little pet gets dragged in front of humans, he won't forget it. He already pulled my apprenticeship stipend last spring over nothing. I can't lose this job. I definitely can't survive whatever he'd call 'a conversation.'"

I didn't get to finish. The kitchen door swung open hard enough to bang the wall, and a police officer stepped through, rain still beading on his jacket, badge catching the overhead light. His eyes swept the stainless steel until they landed on me, and he stopped mid-step.

"You're the one who got hit with the milk?"

Every instinct I owned said disappear, the same instinct that had kept me breathing for twenty-three years. But my face told its own story without my permission raw and blotched, my collar still stuck to my skin.

"You need a paramedic?" he asked, closer now, something like a real alarm crossing his face. "That's going to blister if it hasn't already."

I shook my head, and even that small motion pulled at the burn.

"I'm okay. It was an accident. I don't want to file anything."

"Don't want to?" His eyebrows climbed. "The 911 caller described a man deliberately throwing scalding liquid in your face while his date encouraged him. That's not an accident, that's assault."

"He was gesturing," I said, and the lie sat wrong in my mouth, bitter as burnt espresso. "It slipped. He didn't mean it."

"Sure." He didn't believe a word, and he didn't bother pretending otherwise. His attention drifted to the small camera dome bolted above the pass. "You keep security footage back here? I'll need whatever covers the dining floor."

The floor seemed to tilt under me. I looked at Tobias, silently begging him to keep his mouth shut, and he wouldn't meet my eyes. Instead he squared his shoulders and pointed toward the back hall.

"Right through there, Officer. The manager keeps everything on a drive in the office. It'll have the whole thing from when they sat down to when he grabbed the pitcher."

Something in me went very cold and very still. I couldn't process it. Tobias knew how this worked. He knew exactly what the Court did to people who made a Marrow look bad in front of humans. If Lysandra ended up in a holding cell because of footage from my workplace, I wouldn't just be the girl with no Ember anymore. I'd be the girl who cost the Second's daughter her dignity.

I lunged in front of the officer, nearly catching my foot on the floor mat. "Wait I said I don't want to press charges. Doesn't that count for anything? It's my face. Shouldn't that make it my call?"

He didn't even slow. He stepped around me, gentle but immovable, like water finding its way past a rock.

"Doesn't work that way once it's called in and witnessed, miss. I've got a duty to report it. That's not negotiable."

"But if I refuse to cooperate, there's nothing you can actually do"

He paused there, and the look he gave me wasn't annoying. It was something worse. Pity.

"You're young. Let me give you something free of charge don't spend your life protecting people who'd never spend a second protecting you." Then he was gone, following Tobias down the hall, and I was left standing in the middle of the kitchen shaking, though the ovens were still running hot enough to sweat by.

I was so completely finished.

I'd grown up in a world that worshipped fire it couldn't feel and called it destiny. Nobody ever tucked me in or waited up for me. My whole introduction to existence was a cardboard box on the Ember Court orphan house steps, one month old, no name attached. Being unwanted in a Court built on bloodline is hard enough. Being unwanted and Emberless is something closer to erasure.

Most Court children come into their Kindling by fifteen the moment the fire wakes under the skin and a person becomes what they were always supposed to be. I waited. And waited. I watched the other orphan-house kids catch flame one by one, watched their eyes start to hold that faint ember-glow at night, while I stayed exactly, stubbornly human. The woman who ran the house never let me forget it told me more than once that she should've left me on a different doorstep, one that didn't come with a "defective" attached to the paperwork.

Bloodline is everything in the Ember Court. Matches are made on the promise of strong fire in the next generation, and Emberless orphans are the one guaranteed dead end in that match. I'd probably have been quietly handed off to some human agency if I hadn't turned out fast and stubbornly durable despite it not shifter-strong, but strong enough that the Court found it more convenient to keep me around as cheap labor than to let me go.

Tobias was different. Half-shifter, human mother, Court father who never claimed him. He couldn't Kindle either, but he existed in a kind of gray space I never got allowed among humans, mostly ignored by the Court rather than targeted by it. Nobody went out of their way to hurt him. Nobody went out of their way to help him either. When his mother got sick two winters back, the Court healers wouldn't touch her said human bodies weren't built to hold whatever they did, too fragile a vessel for anything worth doing properly.

He never understood that my silence wasn't a weakness. It was math. He never spent his childhood as the thing the Second's daughter practiced her cruelty on.

The next morning, walking toward the Court's administrative house to answer for it all, my pulse wouldn't settle. Word moves fast in a place this small. Everyone already knew Lysandra had been walked into the back of a squad car, however briefly, however unofficially. It didn't matter that Garrick had her out within the hour with a phone call and a signature. The stain existed now, and in Garrick Marrow's arithmetic, that stain had my name on it.

Garrick answered King Alaric directly, ran security and half the Court's quiet business besides, and where the King ruled with distance, Garrick ruled with attention the kind you never wanted turned your way. He was fiercely, irrationally devoted to his daughter. I still remembered being nine years old, Lysandra shoving me into a fountain because my baking scored higher at a Court fair, and Garrick watching from the porch, laughing while I coughed up water on the grass.

He'd spent years quietly dismantling anything that looked like a future for me. A teacher once praised my knife work in a culinary class; within a week, Garrick had "suggested" I be moved out of the program. When I was placed into an apprenticeship program upstate, funding for my transportation vanished the same week Lysandra failed her own placement exam. Nothing was ever direct. It never needed to be.

I knocked on his office door, and a voice, flat and already bored of me, told me to come in.

Garrick sat behind a desk built from something dark and heavy, a stack of Court ledgers in front of him, and didn't look up when I entered. His pen kept moving, slow and deliberate, ink scratching against paper like he had all day and intended to spend every second of it making me wait. He didn't offer a seat. He didn't acknowledge that I existed at all.

I stood there while the silence stretched thin enough to hear my own pulse in it. This was his favorite opening move letting the quiet do the work before he ever raised a hand. I studied the gray threading through his hair, the hard set of his jaw, and tried to guess how much of today he intended to hurt. My skin still throbbed where the milk had scalded it, a small, constant reminder that in this room, I wasn't a person who'd been hurt. It was a problem waiting to be corrected.

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