I was drowning.

Saltwater filled my mouth, my chest, the inside of my skull. My fingers scraped against rock that wasn't there. Somewhere far above the surface, a man was screaming a name that used to be mine — and then, all at once, air.

Real air. Warm. Smelling of beeswax and pipe tobacco.

I went down hard onto wood I knew. Polished oak. The grain pressed against my cheek the way it had when I was nine and had fallen off the library ladder reaching for a book I wasn't allowed to read.

My father's study.

"Wren? Sweetheart, look at me."

His voice. The way it had sounded before — before the hospital, before the oxygen tube, before the morning a nurse had called me at six a.m. to say words I hadn't been there in person to hear, because I had been somewhere else, doing what someone else had asked me to do.

I lifted my head.

He was three feet away in his wheelchair. His hands trembled around a folded paper. His hair still had black threaded through the silver. The lines I had memorized, kneeling beside a hospital bed two years from now holding a hand that had already gone cold — those lines hadn't deepened yet.

He was alive.

I crawled. I don't remember deciding to. I crawled across the rug like a child and pressed my face into his lap and cried the way I had not let myself cry at his funeral, the way a person only cries when she has been holding her breath for a very long time and her body has finally decided, without asking her, that she is allowed to stop.

"Daddy."

"Wren — baby — what's wrong, what happened —"

"You're here."

"Of course I'm here."

He held my face in both hands. His thumb came away wet. He made a small broken sound I had never heard him make.

He let me cry until the worst of it had gone out of me. Then he pressed a handkerchief into my hand the way he had pressed handkerchiefs into my hand at every funeral I had attended in his company, and he waited.

He had always been a patient man. I had forgotten how patient.

When I could breathe, I looked at the paper still folded between his fingers.

I knew it before he turned it over. Cream cardstock. Silver wax seal pressed with a wolf's head. The Voss contract.

Two names written in dark ink, separated by one word: or.

The first I had loved since I was twelve. I had whispered it into my pillow at fourteen, carved its first letter into the underside of my desk at sixteen, taken it as my own at twenty in a white dress, in front of three hundred people.

Caelan Voss.

I looked at the name and the name looked back at me, and for a long moment I couldn't breathe.

Then I looked at the second one.

The Voss family had two sons. Everyone in this city knew which one mattered. The younger was the one in the photographs, at the parties, in the society pages with my name attached to his like a charm on a bracelet. The older was a name in a ledger. A shadow at the edge of family portraits. A man I had passed in three different hallways across three different years and could not, if pressed, have described to a sketch artist.

Last time, my eyes had skipped over his name on this contract the way a tongue skips over a tooth that doesn't hurt.

This time, I read it.

I read it twice.

I held the paper out with a hand that, to my own surprise, was no longer shaking.

"The older one. Sign it for the older one."

Silence.

It went on so long I almost looked up. I didn't.

"Wren."

"I mean it."

"Sweetheart. Last week you told me that if I so much as wrote his name on a piece of paper in this house, you'd never speak to me again. You said you'd loved Caelan Voss since you were a child. You—" He stopped. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

Whatever he saw in my face made him close his mouth.

His eyes filled. He blinked it away the way he always did. He took my hand, squeezed once, hard.

"All right, baby."

He picked up the desk phone.

He was halfway through dialing when my own phone buzzed against the side table.

I knew before I looked.

Tonight. Crescent Hotel rooftop. Eight. I'll come for you at seven. — C

Seraphina Voss's birthday party. The night, in the other life, when I had stood in a borrowed silver dress and clapped along with three hundred guests while the man who would marry me raised his glass and called another woman the only family I have left.

I typed three words.

I'll be there.

Send.

I would go. Not in silver this time. Not on his arm.

Behind me, my father's voice on the phone, steady now: "—yes, Patriarch. My daughter has decided. We'll have an answer by this evening."

The receiver clicked down.

I stood. My legs held. I was halfway to the door — I needed to wash my face, I needed a hundred small ordinary things to do with my hands — when the door opened from the other side.

Caelan Voss. Black overcoat dusted with rain. Hair damp at the temples. Gold eyes fixed on my face four hours before his driver was supposed to come.

He shouldn't have been here. Mrs. Aldine hadn't announced him. The bell hadn't rung.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

And for the first time in two lifetimes of knowing Caelan Voss, I watched his face do something I had never seen it do before.

He went still. Not the practiced stillness of family dinners. The stillness of a hunter who had walked into a clearing expecting a doe and found something else standing there.

His eyes moved over me. Slowly. They paused at my hands, no longer shaking. They paused — and this was the part I would think about, later, for a long time — at the moonstone pin at my collar. My mother's pin. The one I had buried with her in another life.

"Wren," he said. Quiet. The way a man says a word he is testing the weight of.

"You're early."

"I had a dream."

The room went very still around the word.

"What kind of dream."

"The kind that doesn't go away when you wake up."

I held his eyes. He held mine. Neither of us said the next thing.

He stepped back. Inclined his head a polite half inch.

"My apologies for the intrusion, Miss Hawthorne. I'll see you at eight."

The door closed.

I listened to his footsteps go down the hall. The front door opened. Closed. A car engine pulled away.

I let my breath out. My knees almost went. I caught the desk.

And then I saw it.

On the corner of my father's desk — where Caelan had been standing, where Caelan had not put his hand on a single surface in this room — sat something that had not been there ten minutes ago.

A single earring. A long silver wire. A moonstone at the end, set in a bezel I knew the way I knew my own handwriting.

The Hawthorne moonstones. Four pieces. Pin, ring, two earrings. Locked in my mother's vault since the year she died. I had taken inventory myself, twice, in the other life. Every piece accounted for. The earrings had been my grandmother's. They had not, in four generations, left this house.

Caelan Voss had just left one on my father's desk.

And underneath it, folded once, was a square of cream paper with three words across it in handwriting I had spent two decades learning by heart.

The other one is mine.

The earring was warm.

That was the first wrong thing.

I picked it up. The silver wire was warm the way a coin is warm when it has just been in someone's palm — and Caelan Voss, who had walked into my father's study without touching a single surface, had been holding this in his fist the entire time he'd looked at me.

Three words on the paper underneath.

The other one is mine.

I knew his handwriting. I had spent twenty years learning it. Birthday cards. Notes tucked into the spine of books he'd lent me. The single line he'd written on the inside of my wedding ring, in another life, that I had read every morning for two years without ever asking him what it meant.

This was his hand.

But it was older than it should have been. The slant a little tighter. The downstroke on the m deeper, the way a man writes when he's been writing the same word for a long time and has stopped paying attention to it.

I sat down in my father's chair.

I sat down because I needed to, and because if I kept standing I was going to do something I couldn't take back.

The earring lay in my palm. The pin lay at my collar. Two pieces of the same broken set, one of them in a Voss pocket for — how long. How many years. How many lifetimes.

He had walked into this house this morning to give it back.

Not as a gift. As a signal.

"So you came back too."

I said it to the empty room. The empty room didn't answer.

But somewhere, in a black car driving away from this house in the rain, a man who had let go of my hand on a wet rock above black water knew that I knew.

And he had not stayed to talk about it.

That was the second wrong thing.

Last life, Caelan Voss had been a man who finished what he started. He had sat at my hospital bed for three nights when I had pneumonia at twenty-two. He had walked me through every paragraph of the prenuptial agreement at twenty before I signed it. When he had something to say to me, he said it. He did not leave earrings on desks and walk out into the rain.

Unless he was afraid.

Unless he had walked into this room expecting to find a girl he knew how to handle, and had found someone else, and had needed five minutes alone in a car to decide what kind of enemy I was going to be.

I closed my hand around the earring.

Then I picked up my phone.

I scrolled past Caelan's name. Past two years of saved messages I had cried over in another life. Past contacts I had deleted on the morning of the funeral I should have been at. I went to a number I had never dialed in either lifetime, a number I had memorized once, in the other life, off a folder pushed across a desk in a south tower office by a man I had never thanked.

It rang twice.

"Ryker Voss."

His voice was lower than I remembered. Gravel and smoke. The voice of a man who had been awake for some time before this phone rang.

"This is Wren Hawthorne."

A pause. One second. Two.

"I know who it is."

My pulse did something I didn't have time to look at.

"My father is calling your family head this morning. To formalize. I'm choosing you as my Alpha."

The silence on the line went long enough that I checked the screen.

Still connected.

"Are you sure," he said.

Not a question. A flat, careful sentence laid down between us like a plank over water.

"Yes."

"I'm not Caelan, Wren. I won't coax you. I won't take you to the orchid show in May. I won't remember that on your birthday you want the blue velvet cake from the bakery on Aldemere Street, three layers, no fondant, the cream cheese piped around the bottom."

The air went out of the room.

Blue velvet.

The bakery on Aldemere had closed when I was seventeen. I had cried about it once, alone, in my mother's old sewing room. I had never told anyone. Not my father. Not Caelan, in twenty years of Caelan.

"How," I said. My voice came out wrong. "How do you know that."

"Another time."

"Ryker—"

"Tell me what you need today."

I closed my eyes. I filed it. I put it on a shelf next to every other impossible thing this morning had handed me.

"The Crescent Hotel. Tonight. Eight. Seraphina Voss's birthday. I need you there. On the floor. In the photographs. Beside me when she faints into your brother's arms at nine-fifteen and he gives a toast about the only family I have left."

Another pause. This one had weight.

"You've seen this before."

"Something like that."

"All right. I'm already in the car." No questions. None. "Wren. Listen to me. Whatever you see tonight, whatever Caelan says, whatever she does — don't go into a room alone. Not a powder room. Not a balcony. Not a service hallway."

"Why."

"Because the last time my brother had you alone in a hotel," he said, "you didn't come down the stairs. They carried you."

The line cut.

I sat with the dark phone in my lap for a long count.

Then I stood up and went to dress.

The red dress was at the back of my closet. Silk. Wine-dark. Caelan had picked it out the spring of my twentieth year and told me I looked like something he wanted to drink.

I pulled it off the hanger. I dropped it on the floor.

I stepped over it.

The black one I'd had made last month — before any of this, in a fit of restlessness I hadn't understood at the time — hung in its garment bag like a held breath. I cut the bag open with the sewing scissors. The silk poured out cold against my palms.

Backless to the dip of my spine. High at the throat. Long sleeves. A funeral dress with a slit up the left thigh.

I put it on.

I pinned my hair up tight enough to ache. Mother's moonstone went at my collar where it had always gone. And then, slowly, deliberately, I lifted Caelan's earring to my left ear and slid the silver wire through.

It hung cold against my jaw.

The empty hook on the right caught the lamplight like a question.

Two pieces of a four-piece set. One of them just walked back into this house in a Voss pocket. The other three accounted for in my mother's vault, where they had been since the year she died.

Which meant somewhere — in a Voss safe, in a Voss drawer, in a Voss hand — the fourth piece was still missing.

And whoever had it had been waiting a very long time to bring it home.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

The girl in the glass was not nineteen.

The girl in the glass had buried people.

Downstairs, the front bell rang.

Six-forty-three.

Ryker Voss was early.

The bell rang again.

Six-forty-four.

I did not run down the stairs. I had run down stairs for Caelan Voss in another life — twice a week for two years, in slippers, in nightgowns, hair still wet from the bath — and I had decided, somewhere between the cliff and the rug in my father's study this morning, that I was finished running down stairs for any man with that surname.

I picked up my coat.

I went down at a walking pace.

Mrs. Aldine was already at the door, both hands flat against her apron in the way she pressed them when a guest had arrived who outranked her ability to politely refuse.

"Miss Wren—"

"It's all right, Marta. He's expected."

"It's not — " She stopped. "It's not Master Ryker, miss."

I paused on the second-to-last step.

"Who, then."

"The old Patriarch's driver. He says he won't come in. He says he was told to put it in your hand directly."

She held out a velvet box.

Black. Hinged. The size of a deck of cards. No card. The velvet was warm from her palms — and from someone else's palms before hers, because it had come across the city in the rain in a pocket close to a heart.

I took it.

"Did he say anything."

"Only that the old master said—" Marta frowned, getting it word for word. "Tell her the third one comes home today. The fourth one will find its own way."

I went very still.

The third one.

I stood in my own front hall in a black silk dress with a stranger's earring at my left ear and the velvet of a Voss box warm in my hand, and I understood, in a slow cold way, that the men of the Voss family had been counting these earrings for longer than I had been alive.

The third one comes home today.

Caelan had brought one this morning. Two pieces of a four-piece set. The pin had been at my collar since I was small. Add a third — the one my fingers were about to find in this box — and that left exactly one moonstone unaccounted for in a vault, in a drawer, in a palm somewhere in this city.

The fourth would find its own way.

A promise. Or a warning. I couldn't yet tell which.

I thumbed the velvet open.

It lay on white silk. Long silver wire. Moonstone at the end, set in the same hand-cut bezel I had been looking at for an hour upstairs in the mirror. The mate to the one in my left ear. The mate so exact that the small nick on the underside of the bezel — the one my mother had made the winter I turned six, when she had dropped its twin down the marble stairs and cried — was on this one too.

Which was impossible.

Two earrings could not have the same scratch.

Unless the scratch had been put there twice.

Unless someone, four generations ago or four hours ago, had known the Hawthorne moonstones well enough to forge their flaws as carefully as their setting — and had been moving these pieces around in the dark for a very long time.

I closed the box.

I slid the second earring through my right lobe.

Cold. Heavy. The pair of them now framed my jaw the way my mother's had framed hers in every photograph I had of her after her wedding day. The set was still incomplete. But for the first time since the year she died, I was wearing two of them — and I knew, somewhere underneath the part of me that thought in sentences, that the woman in the mirror tonight was going to look enough like Elara Hawthorne to make at least one person in the Crescent Hotel ballroom drop a glass.

Mrs. Aldine made a small sound behind me.

"Miss Wren. You look just like — "

"I know, Marta."

"Your father shouldn't see that."

"My father will see exactly that, and he will drink a finger of brandy, and he will pretend he didn't."

She didn't argue. She had been in this house since I was seven. She knew what could and couldn't be said about Elara Hawthorne in front of Horace Hawthorne.

The bell rang a third time.

"That'll be him," I said. "The real one this time."

She opened the door.

Ryker Voss was standing on the step.

I had seen this man at three different functions across three different years. I had stood in the same room as him at my own mother's memorial. I had passed him in a hallway at the Voss winter gala in the other life. I had not, in any of those encounters, looked at him.

I looked at him now.

He was a hand taller than Caelan. Broader at the shoulder. Dark hair already going faintly silver at the temples though he could not have been more than thirty-two. The Voss gold eyes — but cooler, set deeper, the eyes of a man who had been watching rooms instead of being watched in them.

He had a long black umbrella in one hand. The rain had stopped ten minutes ago. He had brought it for me anyway.

He took me in.

The black silk. The pins in my hair. The two earrings.

His eyes stopped at the second earring for one beat longer than the first.

"He brought one," Ryker said.

Not a question.

"This morning."

"And the old man sent the third."

"Just now."

"Which leaves."

"One."

Something moved behind his eyes. It was gone before I could name it.

"Your father?" he said.

"In his study. He'd like to see you before we go."

"I'll keep it short."

He stepped past me into the hall. I caught the scent of him as he went by — cedar, cold rain, gun oil, and something else underneath I could not place. Not bergamot. Not Caelan. Something quieter and older. A scent I had, somehow, smelled before in my life, in a room I could not remember being in.

He paused at the study door.

He didn't turn around.

"Wren."

"Yes."

"The folder."

"What folder."

"The one I gave you, in the other life, three weeks after you married my brother. Perimeter security. East wall. The motion array."

The hall went very quiet.

I had thrown that folder in his trash. On the way out of his office. With my wedding ring still scraping against my knuckle and my mouth still full of the cold thing he had said to me.

Congratulations.

I had thrown it in his trash and a man with a knife had come over the east wall of my father's house six weeks later and gotten as far as the rose garden before something dropped him in the dark.

A motion array I had never installed.

A motion array that had been there anyway.

"You put it in," I said.

"I put it in the night you threw the folder away."

"Without my permission."

"Without your knowledge. There's a difference."

He still hadn't turned around. The line of his shoulders under the wet coat was very still.

"There were two more after that one," he said. "The sniper on the roof opposite, the year you turned twenty-three. The car at the south gate, the spring you turned twenty-five. You didn't know about those either."

"Ryker—"

"We're going to be late."

He opened my father's study door and walked through it before I could make my mouth shape the next word.

I stood in the hall with my mother's earrings cold against my jaw and my hands empty at my sides, and I understood, finally, why a man I had never properly looked at had answered his phone on the second ring this morning and said I know who it is before I had told him.

He had been waiting for this call.

He had been waiting, possibly, a very long time.