Hullo. It's been a while since I've done this, so welcome to our new readers from Sierra Leone, Guyana, Korea, Norway, Turkey and Venezuela (damn, you guys are all from such cool places. I think I've learnt more geography from the wattpad demographics map than I ever did in high school).

"Don't make me beg you," I whined. "Please? Just once?"

Liam shook his head. "I'd hurt you."

"How?"

He just shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. Somehow. Your elbow's still screwed up."

I gave a derisive snort. "My elbow is fine."

"Oh, yeah? Do a push-up, and then we can arm wrestle all you like," he said, sitting himself down at the kitchen table to pour himself a glass of cider.

We'd found the secret booze store on Day 2 Of Infinite Boredom. It had been hidden in a cabinet in Alpha Jace's bedroom. A cabinet which was now entirely empty, because there was no way in hell we were going to pass up the chance to nick hundreds of pounds' worth of alcohol. Most was stashed away, but we'd gotten through a few bottles in the four days since.

"You swear?" I demanded. I had a lot of upper-arm strength from running, but that had never been transferable to other kinds of physical exercise.

"Yes. But let's make it ten push-ups."

I jumped off the counter where I'd been perched and got to work. By the time I'd lowered myself to the floor, I had realised it was a mistake. My elbow was getting better every day, but it still felt like bones were grating together when I bent it.

I kept going anyway. We'd spent one hundred and forty-four hours cooped up in this little house, and a chance at five minutes of entertainment was worth any amount of pain. Ten push-ups later, and Liam was looking like he might be starting to regret our little bargain.

"You swore," I reminded him cheerfully, sitting down opposite and bracing my scarred, mangled elbow on the table.

He winced. "Yes, I did."

"And you're not allowed to let me win, either," I told him as he set his glass aside and took my hand. "I'll know if you do."

Liam just sighed at me. We took the strain, and then we started the contest properly. He refrained from letting me win, but what he did instead was almost worse. He'd let me struggle for a minute until his hand was a hairsbreadth above the table, and then, just when I was getting all excited, he'd start applying this gentle, constant pressure.

And slowly, inevitably, my knuckles always hit the wood. It only took about five contests for me to figure out that he was a lot stronger than I was.

"What are you getting out of this, Eva?" he asked me. We were taking a break after my twelfth consecutive defeat because although I'd never have admitted it, my elbow was burning. "I mean, seriously..."

"I'm bored," I murmured by way of explanation. It was only part of the truth, with the other part being that I was feeling starved for physical contact after a week alone with a guy who didn't really like being touched. "So, so bored."

We locked hands for round thirteen. And then, like I'd rubbed some magic lamp, the doorbell rang. I shot up from my chair and peered down the hallway. We tended to leave the door open for airflow, so there was no need for them to ring, really.

Hayden and Hannah were standing on the doorstep. They weren't cuffed for once, and Bryn was standing behind them with his arms slung across their shoulders. Two of the faces in front of me were grumpy, and the third was ecstatic.

"Hey, Eva," Bryn called. "Can we come in?"

"Mm..." I wrinkled up my nose. "I guess. Is there a reason we've got to babysit them?"

"Yes, actually," he said cheerfully. "Glad you asked. There are two reasons. Firstly, they tried to escape again. This time they ran smack bang into your mother. It was very funny - well, for me, anyway. Not so much for them."

"What?"

Bryn grinned at me. "Mm-hmm. You missed a lot. The second reason is that they ran a test on Hannah, and apparently her blood is way too sugary ... but like, in a chronic way."

"My HbA1c results were elevated," Hannah corrected irritably.

"Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Anyway, it's bad, apparently. She needs to eat flockie food for a while, and you've got plenty of that."

"But we've only had you ... what? Two weeks?" I demanded. Sure, she was up and down a lot, but she could use Hayden as a personal sniffer dog, so we hadn't killed her yet.

She made a face. "Really? It feels like a lifetime."

"We're not that bad," I said. "And yeah, we'll keep you. Whatever. Go straight through, and don't touch anything."

"This is my house," Hayden complained, but he did do as he was told. Liam could watch them for a minute, I decided, as I wrapped Bryn in a bruising hug.

"Eira's not with you?" I whispered.

He shrugged at me. "No. She ... uh, she's been having a lot of absences in the last few days. It never lasts long, but my mother said she'd better stay at camp. I only came to drop the flockies - sorry. I gotta go back and keep her company."

"That's cool. I get it. You want to say hi to Liam before you go?"

"Hell yeah. Where is he?"

I gestured to the kitchen. And we walked through together, blinking at the sudden brightness. I was left to stand in the doorway while Bryn went to bump fists with Liam and steal some of his cider.

Hayden was surveying the room with narrowed eyes. We hadn't exactly been keeping the place tidy. Why bother washing up when the flockies had ten of everything? It sorta looked like a bomb had gone off in there, and the open windows had been letting the rain soak patches of every room in the house.

"I'm cleaning this up," he told me matter-of-factly. Clearly, he'd waited for me to come back before saying that because Liam was still sat at the table looking all wary and intimidating. "And I'm closing the windows, too."

I coughed to get his attention. "No, leave the windows."

"Why?"

"Because ... you know ... the air."

Behind me, Bryn nodded vigorously.

Hayden closed his eyes and huffed out a breath, looking for all the world like he had given up on life. "What if I promised you that you won't suffocate?"

Bryn and I had a conversation of glances and facial expression lasting approximately ten seconds, which ended with both of us in firm agreement.

"Sorry," he said. "The committee has spoken. Windows stay open."

Hayden muttered something unrepeatable. He went hunting for cleaning supplies soon afterwards, only to get distracted by the discovery of a packet of biscuits. We did have biscuits in our camps because we weren't savages, but I doubted that anyone had bothered to waste any on the hostages.

So he had sat himself on the kitchen counter to eat them before anyone could take them away. I wouldn't have paid him the slightest bit of attention had Bryn not prodded me and looked pointedly in his direction.

"You see that?" Bryn asked me through the link. "I've been getting vibes off him."

"What ... vibes, Bryn?"

He leaned closer to whisper aloud. "Y'know... Vibes."

I didn't know. I wasn't even sure I wanted to know. Outside, someone honked a car horn to tell him to move his ass. He ignored it, clearly intent on finishing the conversation.

"I do that all the time," I told him. "Sit on the counter, I mean."

"Yeah, but you're short. Just keep an eye on him for me, would you? Tell me if you see anything suspicious, like."

That would be difficult when I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for, but it was always best not to argue with my cousin. "Sure, Bryn. I'll do that."

Satisfied, he slapped my back and headed for the door. "Peace, lads. See you around."

"Bye," we all chorused, with the notable exception of Hannah. At a glance, she looked as grumpy as usual, but I was starting to see the layer beneath that reflex irritation, and it was ... just ... miserable.

"You need the toilet?" I asked her.

"Not rea-"

"Yeah, I thought you might," I cut across, pulling her up by the arm. "Come on."

It wasn't a good idea to leave Hayden and Liam together. I knew that, and yet ... I didn't really care. Liam wouldn't start anything, and Hayden was probably under threat of being removed from the nice, warm house if he didn't behave himself.

I dragged Hannah all the way to the bathroom, and then I kept going. She must have been curious at the very least, because she didn't resist the manhandling. We ended up in a little study with only a desk and a couple of bookcases before I released her.

"What are packs like really?" I asked. I hadn't even known what I was going to ask her until that very moment. It was improvised, to be honest. I just wanted to get her talking.

"An awful lot nicer than living in the bloody woods - that's for sure," she snapped.

For once, I didn't try saying something clever. I didn't try smirking or laughing or brushing it off. Hayden had been easy. He was naïve and overly-friendly, and it had been absurdly easy to get on his good side. Hannah ... though. I reckoned I'd finally figured her out, and so I just stood there and let all my worry and unease about joining Silver Lake come to the surface.

And sure enough, she fiddled with her collar. There were two kinds of people in the world - the ones who liked to be looked after, and the ones who liked to look after others. Hannah was clearly the latter. "I don't know what to tell you, Eva. You'll hate it."

"I know that. Liam's been telling me some things, but he didn't exactly have the typical flockie experience."

"No," she agreed. "Silver Lake is not a 'typical' pack, but they have a lot of the same rules as we do. You can't talk back. You can't even look at someone with a higher ranking. And as a girl, you can't hold a position of authority unless it comes from your mate."

"You will," I pointed out dryly.

"Yes, I will. And do you have any idea how much groundwork that's taken? I still get shit from the guys every single day, and my pack is considered progressive where females are concerned. Hell will freeze over before Silver Lake does the same."

I wrinkled up my nose. "I thought everyone had to do what the Alpha said. If the Alpha says girls and gay people are cool, don't they just ... like ... listen?"

"No. They find themselves a new Alpha."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh. So Jace didn't say a damn thing. It took months to get him to agree to this, so I'm not about to ask for an endorsement."

"Why?" I asked, folding my arms. "Aren't you his niece?"

"He wanted a female Beta, but he didn't want it to be me. His plan had always been to change things very gradually, and this was too much of a leap. I wasn't the ideal candidate, see. It was Hayden who said that shouldn't matter."

"What do you mean you're not the 'ideal' candidate?"

"Well, you know..." Hannah said. "I'm diabetic, and I'm mixed race. It's a lot for people to process, apparently."

I scuffed my heel against the ground. "I don't get it. They give you shit for that?"

She managed a wry smile. "Not openly, and not in any way I can prove, but yes. Of course. It's a fairly closed society, and they're all pasty as hell. There's lots of little comments, you know? The ones you can't go to war over but can't ignore either."

It took me a little while to absorb that information. I'd known about the flockies' love for racially profiling their prisoners, and how some of them were fond of slurs, but I'd never realised that those attitudes might extend to their fellow pack members, too. It was pretty screwed up.

"Anyway," Hannah went on, "I guess I'm lucky to have Hayden. He's nearly as privileged as it's possible to get, but he's good with this kinda thing. He supports me without speaking for me, you know?"

I didn't, really. Unless she meant that quiet way Liam would come and stand behind me when I was bickering with someone. He didn't try and interfere, but I knew he was there if I needed him. Rhodri and Nia had never managed the same subtlety.

"Yeah," I said. "So ... if I were Luna in Silver Lake, and I had an Alpha who supported me like Hayden does for you, could I change things there?"

I was making it sound like a hypothetical question, but it was decidedly not a hypothetical question. Hannah knew that, probably. Now that she was saying more than two words at a time, I was beginning to realise how smart she was.

"Not with a snap of your fingers, no," Hannah said, picking at her nails. "Open a discussion first. Don't make people pick sides and dig their trenches from the get-go. Take it slowly. And start with the children - they're much more open to change. It can be very frustrating, but it does seem to work eventually."

"And what happens if I don't care about alienating the pricks?"

"Then go for it, I guess. Fast and messy. And if you destroy the pack in the process ... well, I think you'll have done the world a favour, to be honest. Silver Lake is fifty shades of screwed up," she told me.

"If you had to pick - us or the Vaughans, who would it be?" I asked slyly.

She wrinkled up her nose. "Ugh, you guys. I've met Mason, and he's ... well..."

Liam's information was seven years old, and pigs would fly before I made him talk about it again, but I wanted to know who we were up against. "Well what?"

"Intense. If you want the full rundown, you'd do better asking Hayden. He goes to all the packmeets. Now, if you don't mind, can we go back to the kitchen?"

Oh, I would definitely ask Hayden. We'd been gone a fair while, and I was beginning to worry what the boys were getting up to, because that kitchen was awfully quiet. As it turned out, I'd been right to worry.

When we rounded the corner, we saw that the boys were both on their feet and staring each other down. Hayden in particular was beside the kitchen counter with a J-cloth in front of him. He was holding his hands up, palms outwards in a placating gesture, for all the good it was doing.

"Pick it up," Liam told him.

Hayden shook his head, taking another step backwards. "I told you. No."

At first, I thought they were talking about the J-cloth, and that caused no end of confusion. It took me a hot minute to notice the knife block beside it and connect the dots.

"What's up, lads?" I asked cautiously.

"Oh, he was eyeing the knives," Liam told me with a humourless grin. "Pick it up, Hayden."

"I'm not going to-"

"Pick it up or I will."

I decided not to interfere. There were two of us and two of them. If it came to a fight, I knew I wasn't going to be much use. And yes, we had the Morrises and their entire raiding team camped down the road, but that wouldn't save us from a good old-fashioned shanking if the flockies tried to get clever. Liam was playing deterrent right now.

Grudgingly, Hayden reached out and closed his hand around the knife. He was probably wondering if this little incident was sufficient to get him kicked out of the lodge within an hour of arriving.

"Good," Liam said. "Now try and kill me."

Hannah tried to take a step forwards. I moved first, putting my back to her in the process, which made me uncomfortable but everyone else a lot safer. From my new vantage point, I could see that Hayden kept adjusting his grip on the hilt. All the more evidence he had no idea how to use it.

Flockies never did.

"You won't get in trouble, Hayden," I sighed. "He's literally asking for it. I'd take the chance, if I were you."

It had been the wrong thing to say. Now he thought it was a trap and that had been a clumsy attempt to lure him in. He looked between us, clearly agonised, and then he shook his head.

And then, just when Liam dropped his guard for a split second, he was moving. Clever boy. As it turned out, the element of surprise wouldn't save him. Nothing could have saved him, if you asked me. It was over before it had even begun.

He made a clumsy swipe at Liam's ribcage, and Liam's hand snapped upwards to catch his wrist. One sharp, merciless twist - and the knife was clattering onto the floor. He kept twisting then until he had the flockie on his knees.

Hayden's eyes flashed black. In the interests of stopping the fight before they really got into it, I reached down and picked up the knife. It was laughably easy to press the tip against Hayden's spine. A single drop of blood soaked through his t-shirt.

"Dead," I muttered. Knife-fighting was one of the only things I was still good at. There were plenty of rogues who could best me, but there were absolutely zero flockies. "Stick to throwing punches, flockie, 'cause you ain't never going to beat us at our own game."

Just to show off, I span it between my fingers as I returned it to the block. The sunlight danced and scattered in all directions for a few heartbeats. Liam didn't look offended by my intervention, surprisingly. He just reached over to knock fists before going back to his cider. Poor Hayden was left to pick himself up and nurse his wrist.

***

We were lounging on the grass. Our allocated outdoors time for each day was one hour. Since I used the majority of that for my run, we liked to make the most of the few minutes remaining. It wasn't quite as relaxing with the flockies there, but they'd looked so sleepy after their lunch that we could at least lie down without feeling like we were about to be murdered.

I lay flat on my back, staring up at the clouds and the patches of blue sky around them. In just a t-shirt, I could feel every single blade of grass brushing against my bare arms, and that was just the way I liked it.

Flockies had this weird habit of killing everything in their lawns except one variety of grass. I'd always thought it was stupid because there were no wildflowers, but it was sure comfortable to lie on. My pillow was a folded jacket, and my feet were bare.

Hayden was sneezing sporadically because he had Hayfever, apparently. When he finally retreated to the shelter of the woods, I followed him and settled with my back against a tree trunk, my legs sprawled into a patch of sunlight so they'd tan. We were only in the fringes, where the grass and the ferns collided and the tree trunks were thinner than my thighs.

"Who dropped you off?" I asked him just for the sake of starting a conversation. Our hostages were always more willing to talk if you began with something inconsequential.

"Um. It was a guy. Middle-aged, I think. Brown hair," Hayden muttered. He wasn't sitting like a normal person - his legs were tangled hopelessly together beneath him. And there was a yew tree above his head, but he hadn't noticed yet. That was fine. It would make a brilliant trap if Hannah or Liam decided to come wandering over. I was content to wait.

"That's Uncle Ollie," I told him. "Not very observant, are you? Do you even know my name?"

He bridled, his forehead creasing and his back straightening. "Actually, Eva, I know plenty. Not much for me to do except listen and watch. Ellis is your brother, and Eira's your sister. Nia, Rhodri and Bryn are siblings. Aside from their dad, they're the only proper Llewellyns left. Mr Vaughan over there is self-explanatory, and-"

I laughed at him. Couldn't help it, really. "You already got two things wrong. First, Nia isn't one of the Llewellyns. She's Fion and Ollie's kid, which means she ain't even related."

"Really?" he asked, scowling. "She looks like them."

He was an idiot. Every tall, racially ambiguous rogue looked like a Llewellyn to flockies, and more than a few of our raiders had died for it.

"Yes, really," I sighed. "Second, Liam goes by Kendrick, not Vaughan. Call him that again and someone's going to floor you."

"His mother's surname, I'm guessing?" he asked, and I nodded. "Figures. I wouldn't want to be affiliated with that family either."

My eyebrows shot upwards. "You're allied to that family."

That easily, I had him on the defensive, and he sat up. His eyes were slightly narrowed, the dark tint a clear warning. "To stop a pack war, yes, and all the destruction that would come with it. My dad was protecting our pack."

"So that's cool with you? You'll happily work with murderers and rapists and people who beat little kids? As long as your pack is okay, the rest of the world can burn?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "And I'm supposed to believe you give a shit about us flockies?"

"We're not talking about me," I told him sharply. "We're talking about you. I'm just a horrible rogue, and you're the one who's supposed to be morally upstanding, after all."

Hayden shifted uncomfortably, and I just waited. Let him stew — let him think for once. So much for asking about Mason. I couldn't let this go now.

"There are some horrible people in the packs," he said eventually. "I don't doubt that. But they're few and far between, while your entire society is built on criminality." 

"So you punish us for stealing by murdering us," I said. My wolf was beginning to surface despite her debilitating cowardice, and that lent fire to my words. "That's a crime, too, by the way. Especially since the half the people you murder are innocent to begin with. Kids died at Lle o Dristwch, and kids are dying every time flockies think they can get away with it. When was the last time we killed a kid in one of our raids?"

That took Hayden a moment. "Tommy Edwards, eight years old, Riverside Pack. He started screaming for help, and one of your friends snapped his neck to shut him up."

"I remember that," I admitted. "I also remember watching the man who did it swing at the end of a rope. Our justice, not yours. No, you guys just razed two of our camps in retaliation. The first two you could find. And then a dozen people died for a crime they didn't commit."

He rolled his eyes. "That's just how war works. You kill some of ours, we kill some of yours."

"You're killing all of us," I snapped. "That's not war, buddy. That's genocide."

I hadn't even noticed that Liam had got up until he was standing right beside us. "There's no point arguing with him, Eva. His dad's had seventeen years to brainwash him. You're not going to undo that in five minutes."

No, but maybe I could undo it over several months with regular conversations like these. They should give him plenty of think about in the copious amounts of free time he enjoyed as a hostage. Slowly, Hannah had said. Well, we were running out of time now. There weren't very many rogues left in Snowdonia these days.

"I haven't been brainwashed," Hayden muttered, but his words had lost most of their force now that it was two against one.

"You're right," I told Liam melodramatically. "He's hopeless."

Hayden scowled. I'd thrown my eyes skywards to add to the effect, and in doing so, I'd realised Liam was about an inch away from the yew tree, so I was getting lowkey excited. Almost as if he'd heard my thoughts, he glanced upwards once, a smirk crept across his lips. We wouldn't be getting an encore of earlier.

"Hannah, why don't you come over here?" I called sweetly. "We were just debating flockie morality."

She hauled herself to her feet and came over with an audible sigh. "Let me guess. You're trying to convince him that you're all just misunderstood."

Liam, Hayden and I were standing at three points of a square, and I'd made damn sure that the fourth was beneath the canopy. Hannah fell right into that trap. The grin that spread across my lips was nothing short of psychotic.

"Look up, guys," I said. "We're going to have a quick lesson in rogue culture. That there is a yew tree. And since you're both standing under it, you have to fight to the death."

Hayden took a few hasty steps backwards, like that would save him. "I'm sorry - to the death? Why?"

"Because I said so, and because that's the rules. I've killed seven people in yew duels. Well ... six and a half, but I'm allowed to round up."

They exchanged a bemused look.

"She's kidding, you know," Liam said nonchalantly. "You're allowed to stop at the first maiming."

He was usually too 'mature' to tease the flockies, so I felt a wicked sort of delight to see that oh-so-serious mask slipping. He must have been as bored as I was.

Hayden's lip curled into the beginnings of a snarl. "I'm not going to maim her, you heathens. You can't make me."

"What makes you think you'd win, Hayden?" Hannah asked dryly.

"I just... I would."

She narrowed her eyes at him.

"We're messing with you, by the way," I cut in before they could start bickering. "You just have to fight - that's all. No death, no maiming. It's like mistletoe, but you kiss them with your fist."

Hannah scrubbed at her face. "Right. Okay. Where did this ... um, tradition even come from?"

"Well, if I remember correctly, my little brother told us it was the tree of death and we all got a little carried away. Now get on with it, would you? We ain't getting any younger."

Hayden got to his feet. He was still reluctant - shuffling his feet and hanging back. Hannah, on the other hand, seemed to be itching to knock him down a few pegs. She was the one who closed the distance, and she was the one who threw the first punch.

I sat back to enjoy the fight, and after a moment, Liam sat down beside me. We'd been a little starved for entertainment in the lodge, so this was a welcome distraction. Neither of them shifted, instead preferring to batter each other with fists and boots. They fought like siblings - messily and using all the dirty, underhand tricks under the sun.

At first, it seemed like Hayden had the upper hand. He used his weight to keep her on the back foot and to pin her to the ground on one occasion. She lodged a knee into his stomach before he could force a submission and flipped the pair of them.

And then began Hayden's downfall. He smacked his chin against the ground as he was falling, and while he was spitting out swearwords and fragments of a broken tooth, Hannah got an arm around his neck and started squeezing.

"Okay, okay," he muttered. "I give up. Geez."

She released him and eyed the tooth fragments, immediately reverting to Concerned Beta Mode. "Shit, Hayden. Are you okay?"

"It wasn't your fault. But yeah, I'm fine. I'll just eat all my meals in liquid form until we rejoin civilisation in a few months."

Goddess above. He could be really dramatic when he wanted to. I trudged over to offer him a hand, and he took it. It was an unfortunate time to discover exactly how heavy he was. I was pretty sure I'd put my back out by the time we got him onto his feet.

"Geez, you're not having the best day, are you, flockie?" I sighed. "Rhodri's mam does dental. She can sort you out when she comes to do our tattoos."

"Okay," Hayden muttered.

It hadn't even been two hours, and already I was beginning to miss the peace and quiet - something I hadn't thought possible. I looked at Liam, and Liam looked back at me, and I knew he was feeling the same way. And yet we had another week of this to look forward to. I could only hope we'd still be sane by the time we got to Silver Lake.