Page 9 of The Wolf Queen’s Curse

As I draw up beside Ann, I murmur, “You don’t need to do that anymore.”

“I do if I want to eat anytime soon. These lugs will mill about until doomsday waiting to be fed.”

Augustus arches his brows, but Ann ignores him. I only met my cousin a week ago, with an inauspicious beginning, where no one told me she was Silas’s niece, and she had to watch me being pampered while she toiled as a housemaid.

Ann started life with her own pampering. I’ve been told that my paternal grandfather—Arthur Stockwell, the Alpha before Silas—was not a good man, but he was very good to the women in his life. His necromancer consort—my grandmother—had been treated as his wife and given the running of the household, a job their daughter—Ann’s mother—took over on her death. As the Alpha’s granddaughter, Ann was raised in luxury. And then Arthur died and my father took over and both Ann and her mother—Silas’s own sister—were sent belowstairs.

Tabitha’s story is just as terrible. Her mother was my father’s consort, a witch he brought to Trevelyan against her will, which violates Pack law. She’d already been pregnant with Tabitha, but my father had overlooked that, probably hoping it meant she was fertile enough to bear him sons. After Tabitha’s birth, her mother tried to escape with the babe, and my father killed her, but not before making her witness what he did to her child, ensuring Tabitha would never speak, a fate even crueler for a witch, who casts with words.

Yes, my father was a monster.

Now that he’s dead, Ann and Tabitha are free, and they might eventually leave us. Bishop has promised Ann money to start a new life with Tabitha. That won’t keep her from grumbling like a cranky older sister forced to manage a passel of rough-and-tumble brothers.

I hold out two chunks of bread, one for her and one for Tabitha.

“No butter and honey, I fear,” I say to Tabitha, who only smiles and bites into the bread with a ferocity to match any wolf here.

I hand a full loaf to Augustus and then set the sack down under a tree, for the rest to divvy up as they wish, which apparently means every wolf for himself, as they pounce, jostling and snapping and growling, as if they aren’t in human form.

Ann sighs and shakes her head.

“How are you?” I ask quietly.

“Alive.” She pauses. “So far. But that might change if Mr. Bishop decides to keep lollygagging around here, where that cabal can find us.”

“It’s just ‘Bishop’ now, and he has plans.” I move closer, voice lowering. “We found some money with Bishop’s horse. Anytime you wish to leave with Tabitha, he’d give you enough to get by on until he can get what he’s promised you.”

Her eyes narrow. “So eager to be rid of me?”

I only give her a hard look that says I won’t dignify that with an answer. She knows she’s welcome to stay as long as she likes. After her ordeal, though, we want to be sure she never feels trapped.

She takes a bite of her bread. “If your grandmother does find us, you’d regret having sent me away.”

“I would,” I say. “You fight very well, and raising the dead is a more valuable weapon than I realized.”

Ann sighs. “You’re doing this wrong. You’re supposed to insult me, not flatter me.”

“I tried matching wits with you at Trevelyan, and you responded poorly. So I’m trying praise, which at the very least will make you uncomfortable.”

Tabitha snickers, and Ann mock scowls at her. I’d like to ask Ann how Tabitha is doing, but I can’t with the girl right there. Mostly, I want to know how Tabitha is handling Marjorie’s betrayal.

Marjorie was another maid at Trevelyan, and the one I’d come to see as a friend. Bishop had trusted her the most, assigning her to look after me. It turned out she’d been a spy for my grandmother, and I wish I could leave it at that—Marjorie is a traitor best forgotten—but she’d helped us escape. Also, she isn’t simply a cabal employee, like Lynch. She’s bound by a generational blood oath, her mother having magically pledged her to Beryl before Marjorie was even born.

I’ll fully admit I don’t understand what that all means, except that if my feelings about Marjorie are complicated, I can only imagine what Ann and Tabitha are going through, having known her for years.

When I spot someone else walking over, I say my goodbyes to Ann and Tabitha and head toward him. Oliver Stockwell is my uncle—my father’s much younger brother. He has the honey-blond hair I shared with my father and our blue eyes, though his are darker than our bright cerulean. He is otherwise nothing like my father, endlessly kind and gentle and patient, and I can’t help lighting up as I approach him.

“You didn’t feel like battling the others for bread scraps,” I say.

“I’ll wait for the meat to be cooked.”

I hold out a piece of bread I’d been nibbling.

He shakes his head. “I’m not taking yours, Cordelia.”

“I saved it for you,” I lie, and then follow it up with a truth: “I was hoping to speak to you, if you have a moment. I promise to be done before the meat is cooked.”

“There’s plenty to go around.” He takes the bread finally, and we start to walk.