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When she finished, she sat back on her heels and studied her work.

“There,” she said. “We fit the dress to you. Not the other way around.”

Then she looked up at me and smiled.

“Go look.”

The only mirror in the room was the small one above the washstand, so I dragged over the chair and climbed onto it until I could see more than my face and shoulders.

For a while, I simply stood there.

The green silk followed the shape of my body now instead of pulling against it. The velvet lacing ran down both sides, dark against my skin. Tamsin had pinned my hair up from my neck, and the little worn gold sun rested at the hollow of my throat. Long black gloves covered the bandages on my palms and reached past my elbows.

I barely recognized myself.

Not because I looked smaller.

I didn’t.

My body was still mine, soft through the waist and hips, full through the thighs. The dress didn’t disguise any of that. It simply fit.

And I liked the way I looked in it.

I touched my gloved fingers to my temple, where the white was beginning to show beneath the dark rinse again.

Tamsin had offered to redo it that afternoon. She had offered to cut my hair, pin it back, leave it loose, whatever I wanted. I had stood there holding the box of dye for almost a minute before setting it down.

“Just hide it,” I’d said.

So she had pinned the darker strands carefully over the white.

I wasn’t ready to let everyone see it. Not tonight, with half the school watching everything I did.

But as I looked at myself in the mirror, I knew I wouldn’t hide it forever.

The Great Hall had been transformed for Bond Night.

The long dining tables were gone, leaving the polished flagstone floor open from wall to wall. Candles burned in tall iron stands and in broad hanging circles suspended from the rafters, filling the room with warm light. Ice sculptures stood at the corners of the Hall: a wolf, a bear, an owl, and a dragon with its wings half spread, each one slowly dripping into a silver basin.

At the far end, beneath the wolf-and-dragon banner, a string quartet played from a raised dais.

Masks were everywhere. Some were feathered, some jeweled, others shaped into the faces of animals. Beneath them, three hundred students moved through the Hall in borrowed silk, tailored suits, and rented velvet.

When the doors opened, people turned.

A lot of them.

I had crossed this Hall on my first night at Ironmoor wearing a pilled cardigan and carrying a rucksack. The next morning, I had stood in the same room while Hollow was stamped beside my name and people laughed. On Monday, I had walked out of it with a spoon shaking in my hand.

Now I stood in the doorway wearing green silk and black velvet, and for once I made myself keep my head up.

“Oh, Dios,” someone said beside me.

Jax was wearing a suit.

It was clearly borrowed. The jacket was too broad through the shoulders, while the sleeves stopped just short of his wrists, and the bruise around his swollen eye had faded to yellow-green beneath a black half-mask. He was also holding himself carefully because of his ribs, which should have made him look ridiculous.

It did not.