Page 86 of The Wolf Queen’s Curse

I lift my hands. “I’m not. It’s just that if you haven’t drunk before, it’s going to hit hard.”

“That would be the point.”

I eye her, and she meets my gaze with her jaw set, eyes daring me to comment.

When the barmaid returns with our pies, I ask for two brandies. She looks at my nearly untouched ale, and I shrug, which she can interpret however she likes. She brings the brandies, and that’s what matters.

I warn Ann that she’d best not drink this as fast or she’ll cough enough to bring the men running over. To my relief, she listens, though she still has the brandy gone before she finishes her pie.

“I don’t want Rufus knowing what happened to my mother and me,” she says.

I’m not sure how feasible that is, but I only say, “I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

“You don’t want him pitying you. You don’t want him feeling as if he should have come back and checked on you and your mother, because he’s a decent man who was fond of you.”

“He taught me to fight,” she says. “My grandfather thought it was adorable, so he encouraged it even when Silas would sneer and posture and say little girls didn’t need such things. Rufus was eighteen and bored, and he said he was only amusing himself, but he took it seriously. As if he knew I might need it someday.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t know what it was like. You can’t. I don’t mean what it was like to be banished to the basement and servitude. What it was like to live with all those wolves who knew me as a little girl, who knew my mother and treated her like a sister or a daughter.”

She reaches for my brandy, and it’s gone before I can stop her. “I hated the ones who didn’t care, those who acted like we’d gotten what we deserved, what all women deserve, but there weren’t many of those. Then there were the ones who were horrified, who tried to help, who wanted to free us and couldn’t because if they failed, Silas would take it out on us. He made sure everyone knew that if they were caught helping us flee, he’d kill me in front of my mother. And they’d have to watch.”

She upends the brandy glass, though it’s already empty. “The worst was my uncle.” She pauses. “Our uncle.”

“Oliver.”

She nods, her gaze on the empty glass. “He was desperate to free us. Of course, Silas knew that. So he told my mother that if Oliver tried anything, she’d watch us both die. Her daughter and her little brother. Oliver was fifteen years her junior. His mother left him with the Pack when he was barely old enough to toddle, and my mother raised him. He was more her son than brother. So she told him not to try rescuing us, that it didn’t matter if he found a seemingly foolproof plan; we wouldn’t go.”

She reaches for my ale, and part of me wants to stop her, but I know she needs to say all of this, and the alcohol is what will get her through it.

I pass over the glass, and she takes a huge swig. “My mother and I lost our privileges and luxuries, but mostly what we suffered was the loss of dignity. We’d always been prisoners of a sort. Birds in a gilded cage.” A humorless smile. “Silas only stripped off the gild. My mother ruled belowstairs, as she’d done above, and I was like Tabi, pampered by the maids, treated like a communal little sister. I won’t say it wasn’t humiliating—Silas treated his own sister and niece as servants—but we weren’t the only ones who suffered. Oliver did. Others did, too, unable to do more than be kind to us.”

“I understand that,” I say, “though I will point out their experience wasn’t nearly as bad as yours.”

“It doesn’t need to be. I can recognize their pain without saying it matches our own. The point is that I don’t want Rufus’s pity. I won’t take it. I won’t suffer it.”

“All right,” I say carefully. “But he’s going to find out, and then he’s going to feel so much worse for teasing you. If you stay, you need to deal with that.”

Her eyes narrow. “Are you telling me to leave the Pack?”

“So apparently alcohol doesn’t make you any less defensive. If I implied I expect you to stay, you’d jump on that, too.”

I hold up a hand against her retort. “I’m saying that Rufus is going to find out. If you did leave, you’d be spared his reaction, but that won’t stop him from reacting. You can decide how you want to handle this. Julius, Bishop, and I won’t tell him.”

She takes another gulp of my ale. Then she pushes back her chair. “Fine. I’m telling him now.”

“Wait!” I say, but it’s too late. She’s striding across the pub.

I catch up as she reaches the men’s table. There’s a bottle of whisky in the middle, and she grabs it and drinks straight from it even as Julius yelps in alarm.

Ann slams the bottle down and turns to Rufus. “I need to tell you something.”

“All right…” Rufus says, looking from her to the bottle. “What have I done now?”

“You—”

She stops. Sways. Makes a horrible face.