The car engine spluttered and died. Dad took the keys out and turned around in his seat to smile at us. "Not bad, is it?"

Not bad? It looked like something out of a movie. The lodge was built from actual ... well, logs, and it was bigger than the cabin at Haven by a long way. There was a neat garden out the front, a few weeds pushing up between the rose beds, and a drive lined by magnolia trees.

But none of that made me want to stay there. I didn't want luxury. I wanted threadbare tents and leaves crunching underfoot and the canopy overhead. I wanted rough and uncomfortable. It felt so much more real than this manufactured, 'perfect' place.

"Do we have to, Dad?" I whined.

He sighed. "You'll probably enjoy yourself, Eva. Your mother said you should try to stay inside the house as much as possible, but aside from that, you can do whatever the hell you want for a few weeks. Think of it like a holiday."

I made a disgusted noise in the back of my throat. I'd never taken a holiday in my life, and I wasn't about to start now. We would end up sitting around bored out of our minds, especially if we weren't even supposed to go outside. What did flockies do all day, anyway?

"You've got an entire raiding team at the perimeter in case Jace tries anything stupid," Dad went on, noticing my sullen silence. "There's a phone for emergencies, and ... um ... I'm supposed to give you this, too."

He turfed a little Motorola and a large notebook into the backseat. Liam picked them up and opened the notebook before I could even twitch. I saw his eyebrows rise sharply. "We're supposed to learn all of this?"

Dad shrugged. "Don't ask me. I don't even know what's in there."

I craned over to look. My reading wasn't flawless, but it was more a lack of patience than a lack of ability. "What is in there?"

"It's about New Dawn, mostly, but there's also shit about ... well ... how to be a flockie, I guess. I already know how to be a flockie."

"I don't," I muttered. And I didn't want to know.

It was starting to rain. We had the windows open for Liam's sake, and I felt the steady patter of droplets against my bare arm. Within a few seconds, the drizzle had turned to veritable sheets of water. Liam had to tuck the notebook under his jacket to protect it.

"I'm not going to see you again before you leave," Dad told me quietly. "So how about a hug, kiddo?"

And I gave him one. It was difficult - I was leaning forwards from the back seat, and he was twisted around in his, but it was as fierce as it was possible for a hug to be. I was furious to find my eyes watery by the time I broke away. While I rubbed at them, Dad had another attempt at contortionism to shake Liam's hand.

"Stay safe," he said firmly. "Both of you. Some things just aren't worth dying over."

"We will," I mumbled, and then I got out of the car before I could get properly choked up. I didn't like all these goodbyes, and I didn't like seeing Dad upset. Liam followed me, closing the car door behind him.

Almost as an afterthought, I went to lean back into the car for a moment to say, "Oh, by the way, I made a lot of promises to Hayden about books and soapy water that I don't intend to keep. It'd be really cool if you could go and help him out for me. Maybe. Please. Yeah."

And then I ducked out again before he could refuse. We walked towards the front door. It wasn't locked, and the hallway was filled with boxes like someone had just made a delivery. The first few were full of clothes - horrible confining flockie clothes to make us smell right - and the next few were cool boxes full of Tupperware containers. Apparently, we had to eat flockie food, too, because food could change your scent. I reckoned it would just be like eating from Maggie's truck every day, so I wasn't going to complain.

Every single one was labelled with its contents - lasagne, shepherd's pie, Bolognese, and so on. The approximate carbs were scrawled beneath the names, like Jace had hoped some of these might find their way to Hannah.

"We'd better get these in the freezer," Liam said.

What the hell was a freezer? Warily, I picked up one of the boxes and lugged it down the hallway. I peered into a disgustingly luxurious lounge and a toilet room large enough to throw a party in before I caught a glimpse of counters and barstools. Food was kept in the kitchen. I knew that much.

Liam opened the bottom half of the fridge, and a blast of cold air hit both of us. I jumped backwards reflexively and bruised my tailbone on a kitchen counter. It took me some time to work up the courage to creep forwards and press a finger to the inside. It came away numb.

"Holy shit, that's cold," I gasped. "We can't put the food in there. It'll turn to ice."

Even with his back turned, I could tell that Liam was grinning. He crouched down to open the drawers, and then he sat himself on the tiles to fill them. "That's kinda the point. They go in and freeze and then you can leave it for months without it going bad."

"I don't want to eat frozen food, thanks. I've got enough broken teeth as it is."

This time he couldn't contain a snort of laughter. "Oh, Eva. You warm it up first."

"No, no, no," I growled, prodding him just below the ribcage. "You don't get to laugh at me, sir. You didn't even know how to make a fire when you came to us."

Liam held up his hands in surrender. "True. You were very patient with me."

"And how long did I spent teaching you the plants?"

"A long time," he sighed.

I gave an exaggerated nod. "Yeah. A long time. So shut up and tell me what this does."

I was pointing to some metal and plastic jug-like contraption that was plugged into the wall. Liam closed the freezer to come and stand behind me. "That's a kettle. You put water in, and it boils."

"Well, that's pointless," I muttered. Maybe flockies were too dumb to know that you could just put a saucepan over the stove. "Can I use it to make tea?"

"Only if you turn it on first."

He leaned over me to press a switch on the wall. I knew that was a plug, at least. There were three little holes where the electricity came out. I'd always wondered vaguely what would happen if you put your fingers in there.

He helped me work out how to fill the 'kettle,' and then we both watched it boil. It was fascinating to be honest - not a flame in sight, and yet there was soon steam whistling from the lid. My eyes were wide by the time it was done, and the awe was infectious, apparently. Liam seemed to smile every time he looked at me.

We hunted down teabags and spoons and milk in the span of a minute. Mugs were slower - it took Liam a while to convince me that flockies could be stupid enough to make them out of stone. It made them heavy, and it meant that they'd smash if you dropped them. And, yes, I had to throw one at the floor just to test that. Liam was still picking up the pieces by the time the tea was ready.

We took our mugs on an expedition around the lodge. There were four bedrooms, all with double beds bigger than our entire tent and flat screens on the walls. Clearly, New Dawn had spared no expense when it came to their holiday house. They had not, however, invested in anything we could actually do. We managed to waste the entire afternoon flitting from task to task because there was nothing which could hold my attention for longer than a minute.

We explored the entire lodge twice over, with Liam explaining what things did until my brain was full to bursting. We played Pictionary. We opened every window we could just to make it feel more like the outdoors. We even heated up some of the food for our dinner in a strange and suspicious appliance that cooked things without getting hot itself.

It was in the aftermath of that meal that I found my way into the living room. I ignored the plush sofas in favour of a rug in the middle of the floor. It was probably more comfortable than my camp-bed, if I was being honest, and I was soon starting to feel drowsy.

"Is this a fireplace?" I asked

Liam nodded. He was sat on the floor, too, his back against the sofa and his legs sprawling. His hair was messier than usual - sticking up like the wind had been nagging at it.

"I thought flockies got their heat from the metal things," I grumbled.

"Radiators. And yes, they do. The fire is ... well, it's decorative, I guess."

"Decorative," I repeated derisively. "Right. This is where we're going to hang out from now on. Light it up."

He turned on the gas for me. Within a few minutes, I was full and tired and safe and now warm. It was as close to a campfire as we were going to get. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, but I fought through it. Every minute I could delay my bedtime was another minute I wouldn't have to spend in an overwhelmingly-sized bed all by myself.

"Where did we meet?" I asked.

Liam gave me an exasperated look. "You don't remember?"

It would be a hard occasion to forget. I shook my head wearily and tried again. "No, I mean fake us. Where did we meet?"

"Oh," he said, scratching his head. "That depends. Are we from the same pack, or did you move?"

"Dunno. Throw me the book."

He slid it over instead, and I began leafing through. There was nothing in the notebook itself about our invented backstories, but tucked into the back cover were a few sheets of crumpled paper. It only me a moment to realise that they were photocopies of the application which had gone to Silver Lake on our behalf.

"Ooh, look at this. Eva Morgan. Yeah, that's about right. Nineteen? Close, I guess. I am in fact from New Dawn, and I've been working in the kitchens there for the last year."

Liam huffed out a breath. "You get to use your real name?"

My dad's family was actually quite respected amongst the packs. All of his brothers and sisters were nice, law-abiding citizens, which made him the odd one out, I supposed. The surname would only be a point in my favour. According to this notebook, I was the daughter of Ashley and Aileen Morgan. And as for the first name ... well, I liked to think the denizens of Silver Lake would have heard of me, but that was probably just wistful thinking.

"Yes, I do. You don't. It says you're called Alex Hayes. You're twenty, apparently, and you're a professional ballroom dancer."

He just snorted and refused to rise to it. He knew what it really said as well as I did - his forged identity had two years of service in assorted New Dawn fighting units. Four months in Scouts, eleven months in Night Patrol, etcetera, etcetera. There was no other plausible career for a young man of his stature. I went on reading.

"Hey, listen to this. 'Do you have pups? Are you currently expecting a pup? If no, why not?'" I read. "What the hell kind of application is this? You can't ask that."

Liam came to join me on the rug with a shit-eating grin. "Apparently you can. What did Jace put?"

I made my eyes go very wide. "Um. It says ... oh, wow..."

"What?" he demanded.

"That you're impotent."

"Very funny, Eva."

"Kidding, kidding," I sighed. "I have a Bonsai Tree growing in my uterus."

He rolled his eyes. "Give it here."

I did no such thing, but a jab at my side and some well-timed tugging achieved the same end. He was sitting cross-legged beside me, and if I lay flat on my back, I could smirk up at him quite comfortably.

"It just says we've only been trying for a month," he told me. "Clearly, we haven't been trying very hard."

"Yeah, I hadn't even noticed," I agreed. "You'd better step up your game."

Liam flicked my ear and kept reading. The entire application was ten pages long, so there were plenty more gems hidden in Jace's scrawled handwriting to keep us laughing for an entire hour. When we were finished with that and more than a little breathless, I took the notebook back to skim through.

I managed about three sentences before I got bored, but I kept trying anyway. I found myself staring at the same paragraph for minutes at a time, my eyes glazed and blurring. The words went in and straight out again. By the time I reached the halfway mark, I was blinking with every other heartbeat.

"There's a lot about New Dawn in here," I muttered, dumping the notebook into his lap. "But I haven't seen jack squat about Silver Lake, and that's what I'm more itchy to learn right now."

"What do you want to know?" Liam snorted. "Because I reckon I might know a few things."

My eyes snapped towards him, and I felt my muscles coiling tighter. "No, I didn't mean- You don't have to..."

He offered me a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "If I can't even talk about it, how am I going to walk into that house?"

Exactly. I still wasn't convinced that we'd make it past the front door. Some things were just unreasonable to expect from another person, and this was one of those things.

"Okay," I said grudgingly. "Just ... take it slow. We can stop whenever."

We hadn't even started yet, and already he wasn't looking at me. He was picking at the rougher edges of his fingernails. "Do you have anything in particular you want to know?"

I sat up and crossed my legs, too, so we were facing each other properly. "I don't mind. Anything."

He took an audible breath. "Alright. We'll start at the beginning then, I guess. My father was Alpha for ... what? Six years? Something like that. When he died, his Beta took over until Adrian turned seventeen and killed him."

"Adrian is one of your half-brothers?" I asked in the pause.

"Yeah," Liam said, glancing up at me for a heartbeat. "The oldest. He was grown before I was even born, so he left me alone mostly. I wasn't a threat, or whatever. The others, though ... he'd beat on all of them when he had a few drinks in him."

I swallowed a lump in my throat. "Okay. He's dead now, isn't he?"

He nodded. "Mason got sick of his shit, I guess."

"Mason," I said quietly. It was a prompt, almost. I had eleven years' worth of catching up to do, and that name was the only one I'd heard before.

"Mason," Liam repeated, the hesitation evident in his voice, "was the manipulative one, even when we were little. Everything he did ... there was always a reason behind it. Always a lesson to learn. Sometimes, when I did what he wanted, he'd give me something or make the others leave me alone for a few days. It took me a while to wise up to that."

I was afraid to ask it. The first time I tried to form the words, they went scampering down my throat, but Liam had gone quiet anyway, so I had plenty of time to try again. "Did he ... ever ..."

Luckily, he didn't even need me to finish the question.

"Yes. A lot. The others would just take a swing, but Mason was ... I don't know. Imaginative. Resourceful, even." He hiked up his shirt to show me the burn scars that covered his left side. "Take these, for example. A few seconds with a lighter hurts more than any number of kicks, and it don't heal half so quick. Leaves you with a nice reminder for a week or two."

I went very still. I was hardly daring to breathe, let alone look at him. I'd guessed as much when he'd first refused to touch a lighter - I'd seen the scars, and I could add two and two together - but hearing it confirmed was another thing altogether.

So much of this had been a guessing game. Until now, I hadn't known for certain that his brothers were responsible for all the scars and the flinching ... because he hadn't even admitted that much. It was strange hearing him talk about it now, after so much silence, with this eerie flippancy.

"Felix is next," Liam went on. There was a new note of caution in his voice, like he'd noticed my stillness and decided to tone it down. "He was on coke by the time he was twelve. He's not stupid, I guess, but he's not anything special either. He did what Mason told him, and I'm willing to bet he still does, since he's Beta now."

I nodded along. This was safer terrain, by the sounds of it. I wasn't going to mention Mason again if I could help it.

He scratched the back of his neck. "And, um, Micah's closest to my age. He got beaten black and blue by the others, and he took it out on me because ... well, he could. Dumb as a doornail and twice as vicious. If anyone was going to challenge Mason, it'd be him. He's too stupid to know he'd lose."

"And he's what?" I asked. "Just a pack member?"

"He's Third, which means he's in charge of the fighters."

So Liam would be working under him. Great. That was just ... great.

"Let me check I've got all of this," I said, now that he seemed to have finished. "Adrian was the Alpha, but he's dead now. Mason took over from him. Felix is the Beta, and Micah's Third in Command. Is that everyone?"

Liam nodded. "Everyone important. I have a half-sister, too, but she didn't live with us. Lucky her."

I scratched at my elbow, which had been itching nonstop all day. "Okay. Shit. Your family is complicated."

He managed a grin then, even if it was a little forced. "You're one to talk."

"Mine is big. Yours is... Well. How do I put this nicely?"

"You don't," Liam sighed. "I'm hardly gonna get offended."

I acknowledged that with a grimace. "No, I guess not. Do ... do you hate them?"

"I wish it was that simple," he said miserably. "I do. But for a long time, they were all I had. They took me to school, made me sandwiches, you know? Sometimes, on the weekends, we'd go to the cinema, and they'd buy me popcorn and whatever. I can't forget that shit any more than I can forget them beating on me."

I didn't know what to say. I'd never really thought of it that way. I'd never really thought of it at all. My family had its faults, of course, but we'd always been functional enough. No one had ever raised a hand to me in anger. It took me a while to get my head around the fact that I probably wouldn't ever understand how it felt to have fear and love so hopelessly tangled together.

"And when I was little," he continued, "Mason actually tried to ... I don't know ... protect me. From the others. From Dad. It was just him being territorial, of course. I knew that. It didn't make it any easier to ... y'know ... not be grateful. And then I felt guilty for hating him."

"I'll hate him for you, then. He's bloody horrible. Sadistic, psychopathic, evil - the whole works," I muttered.

Liam shook his head patiently. "He's not ... evil. None of them are evil. They just got screwed up, I guess. It's not like we're born with moral compasses. I thought a lot of things were okay when I came to live with you, and it took me a while to get that straight."

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I sensed that there was more, and it only took about half a minute for him to put the next part into words.

"The only thing that made me different, really, is that I was the youngest. If I hadn't been... Shit. I honestly don't know. Every single one of them was decent when they were a kid, and every single one of them flipped. Dad hit Adrian, Adrian hit Mason, and on and on it went."

"Hey," I said fiercely. "You're not like them, okay? You didn't hit anyone."

He finally looked at me, and there was a coldness in his eyes like I'd never seen before. It wasn't directed at me, I didn't think, but it was still there. "Are you sure about that, Eva?"

I didn't like that tone. Not one bit. It was stiff and empty, and it made me sit up a little straighter. "Of course you had to defend yourself-"

"I'm not talking about defending myself."

Never had so few words sent a shiver running down my spine. Maybe I didn't know him as well as I thought I did. Those missing eleven years had always hung between us like a gaping chasm, but that had never been a problem because I'd never looked down.

"You were ten years old. If that," I pointed out firmly.

"So? Does that make it okay?" he asked.

I kinda shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know. You ran away, though. That's got to count for something."

Liam blew out. "Yes, I ran away. That makes me a coward if nothing else."

I had no idea how to respond to that. None at all. And I was willing to bet it was written all over my face, because Liam shut his eyes for a moment. Wincing, almost. When he opened them again, they had been carefully emptied of emotion.

"I think we should stop for today," he said quietly.

I nodded automatically. I was too shaken to even start unpacking what the hell had just happened. "Okay."

He went up to bed, leaving me to stare at those artificial flames and try to work out where it had all gone so horribly wrong. It was a little while before I could bear to drag myself upstairs and find my bed. When I did finally crawl under the covers, I could only toss and turn there, the things he'd said reeling through my mind over and over again.

I wasn't sure if I was the right person to be going into Silver Lake with him. I didn't really feel qualified to help him cope with this shit when I didn't have the faintest clue how it felt. In fact, as it stood, I'd only managed to make things worse.

My wolf didn't like being alone, either. It didn't help that we were in a strange place and it smelt like flockies. I'd gotten used to falling asleep with a heartbeat on either side, so it was horribly quiet in here.

It took me about an hour to work up the courage to creep down the hallway and find Liam's room. It took me another few minutes to summon enough to push the door open.

"Liam?" I whispered into the dark room, just in case he was asleep. The window was still open from our earlier escapades, and the breeze was making the curtains float and quiver.

There was enough moonlight to see him sit up in bed. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Just can't sleep, I guess."

There was a moment of horrible, horrible silence, then-

"Come here," Liam said wearily.

I padded across the floor and slipped into the bed beside him. He wasn't wearing his shirt, and I didn't blame him, really. Even with the window open, it was hotter than we were used to. I would have started stripping myself if it had been socially acceptable. He lay back down, and I followed his example so we were facing each other.

"I can stay?" I asked him with an unusual shyness.

He heaved a sigh. "Yes. You can stay, Eva. Just this once."

He was teasing me, and I knew it. The act itself was flawless, but there was this little spark of mischief in his eyes that gave the game away every single time. I let my head sink into the pillow and felt a few ounces of tension drain from my body with every breath I took.

"Don't like these beds," I grumbled. "If I wanted to sleep on a marshmallow, I'd go sleep on a marshmallow. Plus, we're like ... off the ground. Why is that? I feel like I could just roll over in the night and fall onto my face."

He looked like he was trying to hide a grin. "Yes. That is a very real danger."

"I like the pillows, though," I said after a moment. At camp, we just built pillows from spare clothing, and they were always lumpy. "This blanket is okay, too. It's like an unzipped sleeping bag."

"You mean the duvet?"

"Probably."

"Then let's take the pillows and the duvet and find somewhere better to sleep," Liam said, already halfway out of bed. I had to scramble to follow him.

Somewhere better turned out to be that rug beside the fire. We made ourselves a very messy bed atop it, and then we snuck biscuits and cans of cola from the kitchen and had a little midnight feast while we waited for the room to cool down.

It was probably three in the morning by the time I finally nodded off. One day down. Thirteen to go.