As we were walking to the canteen, I caught a glimpse of a vast expanse of blue water through one of the windows. I supposed I'd known there must be a lake here somewhere, but I hadn't really noticed that it was missing until now. While Lin ploughed on, I stopped to stare.

"It's ... massive," I whispered, knowing Liam was behind me. And it was. Big enough that I couldn't properly see the far side. Big enough that there were sailboats racing across. Maybe I could go swimming one of these days — it was certainly warm enough.

"Mm," he said. There were a lot of people filling towards the canteen, but none of them paid us any heed. We were tucked into the window alcove. All the same, he lowered his voice a little further. "I never thought I'd see it again."

"Is it weird?" I asked. "Being back, I mean..."

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I was berating myself. Of course it was weird for him. How could it not be? He didn't seem to think it was a silly question, though. He just shrugged at me. "I guess. Everything seems smaller than it did before."

"That's because you've got bigger," I laughed.

He thought it over for a moment. "That could be it, yeah."

Lin had come back to find us. She was standing in the middle of the traffic now, arms folded and eyebrows raised. "Come on, guys. Geez. You're going to get lost if you keep wandering off."

I doubted that. Liam had grown up here, and it couldn't have changed that much in the last seven years. On the way, he'd been making the turns long before our guide. I'd needed to nudge him and remind him to play ignorant more than once. We fell in behind her with murmured apologies.

The canteen was noisy. The wave of sound hit me as I walked through the door and clung to me as we followed Lin to an empty table. The food had been laid out in advance to avoid the hierarchal nightmare of queueing, which I was grateful for. I had no idea where I stood with these catty females.

I sat beside Liam, of course, with Lin on my other side. There was bread and cheeses and things like that. The bowls of salad seemed to outnumber the cakes by far. I loaded the ingredients for a sandwich onto my plate and set to work. It was only when I was about to take a bite that Lin caught my wrist.

No one else on the table had touched the food. In fact, now that I was looking properly, I realised that no one in the entire room had touched their food. Two hundred and fifty people, and they were all just sitting there. Waiting. Our closest neighbours were staring at me disdainfully.

"We have to wait for the Alpha and Luna," Lin explained gently.

For Goddess' sake. From what Felix had said, I doubted they'd be coming down for lunch. I doubted Felix would be, either. We'd be waiting a very long time.

Liam had bread on his plate, too. He knew the rules, I reckoned, so he'd probably just taken it to disguise my ignorance on the subject. For all the denizens of Silver Lake knew, our last pack hadn't followed this bullshit custom. He was grinning at me in a rueful, apologetic kind of way. I was glad he hadn't tried to stop me — that would have been even more suspicious.

"Oh," I murmured. "Our bad."

Lin shrugged at me. "It's cool. You're still learning. Just be ready to grovel if any of the gods-made-flesh see your plate."

One of the older women at the table leaned towards us, her forehead creasing as she let out a quiet snarl.

"Mao Lin," she said sharply. "You watch your tone."

Lin ducked her head and nodded meekly. The contrite act fell apart as soon as the woman looked away. Soon, she was biting her lip to hide a smile and catching my eye in a way that made it difficult not to start sniggering.

The noise level plummeted without warning. Warily, I turned towards the door, where the hush seemed to have originated. Most people were in their seats, but a new group of people had just come in. These were obviously the fighters coming back from training, because ... eh, you could just tell.

They were led by a giant of a man in a vest and basketball shorts. He was closer to seven feet tall than six, and he was built like a tank. It might have been my imagination, but I reckoned the floor shook a little as he walked down the aisle between the tables. I hunched over the table to hide my plate from him.

Liam had gone very still again. I could hear his heart picking up the pace and feel the tension in his muscles where his shoulder brushed against mine. I turned in my seat and caught his eye. We stared at each other, sharing the nerves and the wariness, because here was another person who might recognise him.

"That's our third," Lin told me in an overloud whisper. "Micah Vaughan. Stay out of his way, my young padawan. I'm not kidding. He's got a nasty reputation."

The woman opposite us had been eavesdropping again. She leant forwards, opening her mouth to give Lin the dressing-down of her lifetime, no doubt. But then one of the fighters in Micah's wake stopped behind Lin and seized her by the elbow before she could get the chance.

"Sorry, ma'am," he said, "but I'm going to have to ask you to come with me. You can't say things like that."

My hand flew to my knife. I stopped short of extracting it from my pocket, but I didn't drop it either. I'd just made a friend who was actually bearable, and if this up-jumped piece of shit thought he could take her away, he was very, very wrong.

Lin turned to scowl at him. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. On your feet."

"Screw you," she retorted, but she did obey him, and they were soon nose to nose in the aisle. He took hold of her hands and pulled her closer still. My knuckles tightened around the knife hilt.

And suddenly ... they were kissing. I didn't see it happen, to be honest, because I'd blinked, but I did see the aftermath. They were all tongues and strange little slurping noises and roaming hands. Lin was giggling.

I—

Wait, what?

"I'll lose my appetite if you two don't stop soon," the woman opposite us muttered.

They paused their face-sucking for a moment as Lin plastered a sickly-sweet smile onto her face. "Would you mind just crawling out of my ass for one second, Karen? Thanks."

Karen's face soured. Lin went back to kissing the man who I now realised might be her mate. While everyone was distracted by ... that, Liam had snuck a handful of grapes. He winked at me as he smuggled them into his mouth and chewed with excruciating slowness.

I put my hand into his lap, and he slipped me a few. We managed to scoff the vast majority before Lin turned back towards us, and our neighbours were none the wiser. It was the most rogue I'd felt in a long time.

Will was waiting to sit down. We moved up, and he plopped himself onto the bench beside me. He had messy ginger hair, and he was built in the way that all pack fighters were. They had these huge, contoured muscles which were obviously the result of long hours spent in the gym.

Personally, I preferred the rogue boys with their slimmer, natural builds to people who looked like they'd just stepped out of a body-building magazine. It freaked me out when you could see the veins in someone's arms, and I could see two of Will's right now.

He was looking at Liam and me curiously. Not because he didn't recognise us and not because he had any reason to suspect we were friends with his mate, but simply because we were staring at him.

"Hi..." he offered hesitantly.

"Oh. Will, these are the new neighbours," Lin cut in before I had to return the greeting. "If I knew their names, I'd tell you, but we haven't got that far yet, apparently. What are your names?"

I nearly said Liam. I had to halt myself mid-breath and choke back the word while Liam told them the correct answer. Letting my guard down even a fraction was dangerous, it seemed.

"Oh, awesome," Will said. "You must be the new guy on my patrol. The others are all pricks, if I'm being honest, but my transfer request was denied, so..."

Liam let out a half-hearted groan. "Brilliant. Glad I've won the co-worker lottery, then."

I found myself smiling. Liam was better at this than I was. That had been obvious from the beginning. He seemed to know how to talk to the flockies, and I was only too happy to let him.

Will inclined his head. "Mm. There are worse places to be assigned, mind. Keep your head down and who knows? In a month or so, they might promote you to somewhere nicer. You any good with your teeth?"

Liam's answer was a grimace, and Will laughed at him in the nicest way possible. If I had any money, I'd bet that Liam could put a thrashing on every guy in the room, but I'd also bet that would make his brothers real suspicious, so he'd have to play useless for the time being.

At some point while we'd been getting acquainted, Micah had started eating his food, and the rest of the hall had followed his example. I picked at my sandwich and looked at the people around me out of the corners of my eyes. My wolf didn't like being so thoroughly surrounded by pack wolves.

"No Alpha, no Beta... I wonder where everyone is," Lin murmured. "Maybe the packmeet is today."

"It's not," Will said. "I'd have heard something."

Yep. The packmeet was next week. We were getting all of our intel hot off the press at the moment, what with Jace obeying our every whim. Liam and I certainly wouldn't be able to stop the amendment passing, but we might be able to reverse it the month after.

"Maybe there was a rogue attack," she mused, clearly unwilling to drop it. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I wasn't sure if I should admit that I knew Felix was high, and Mason and his mate were off making puppies in some distant corner of the pack house.

Will shook his head. "Sirens didn't go off."

"No, but they're about to," Lin muttered. I followed her gaze. At the head table, Micah Vaughan was on his feet, dinner abandoned. Some scrawny initiate was whispering in his ear.

And sure enough, the same bells which had called us to the dinner hall began to ring in an entirely different way. It was one long, pealing sound, loud enough to bruise my eardrums. Before they'd finished going off, half a dozen men were on their feet and heading for a fire door. Micah was amongst them.

"Do we need to do something?" I asked Lin dryly. "Run and hide or...?"

"No, we just sit here and wait for the all-clear," she told me. "We have a rapid response unit ready to go twenty-four-seven, so the bastards never get within a mile of the pack house."

That was nice and all, but it was very rare that we actually tried to get anywhere near a pack house these days. We just liked to take the easy pickings on the outskirts of the territory and get our arses back over the border before idiots like those could get within a mile.

"Yeah, no need to worry, Eva," Will said, bracing his forearms against the table as he leant forwards to grin at me. His tone was probably meant to be soothing. "You're perfectly safe here ... 'long as us lads do our jobs properly."

Goddess above. The audacity of these people. Even this supposedly decent guy was patronising me. I stuffed a sandwich crust in my mouth to wash the sour taste away.

My eyes were drawn to the row of empty seats at the head table, where Micah had been sitting. They were on a platform so they could look down at the rest of us, and hanging from the wall behind them was—

"Is that a wolf pelt?" I demanded.

"Oh, yes. Well spotted," Lin said, the excitement lending volume to her voice. "It's Rhodric Llewellyn's pelt. Alpha Keith killed him in single combat back in the day. We're all quite proud of it, obviously."

Nope. Literally just ... nope.

I looked at the pelt, which was ratty and grey and entirely the wrong colour to belong to a Llewellyn even if that story hadn't been utter bullshit. Then I looked back at Liam, who was trying not to laugh.

"He really is dead, then?" he asked. "Because we've heard rumours—"

Will gave him a funny look. "Unless he's walking around without his skin, yeah. He's dead. Long dead."

I had to bite my tongue. I really did. We all knew Rhodric was dead, and we'd been to his grave often enough, but we liked to spread rumours to the contrary because it scared the flockies shitless. This entire narrative was just offensive to me.

We got through the rest of the meal without any more mention of rogues or members of my extended family. I wasn't used to being allowed to eat as much as I wanted — we never had more food than we strictly needed, if that — so I was hoping to gain some weight during my stay at Silver Lake.

Liam hardly ate anything. I wasn't sure if it was a side-effect of the medication or a side-effect of being back in this house, but I didn't ask. I just finished off his sandwich for him and did my best to distract our new friends from his missing appetite.

People were soon trickling out of the dining room in twos and threes. I was still scoffing grapes by the handful, already dreading the moment when lunch would end entirely and we'd be expected to go to work.

"I don't want to split up," I muttered. In the corner of my eye, I could see Stevens approaching, so I knew we didn't have much longer. "Do we have to?"

Liam followed my gaze. "As much as I'd love to have you on patrol ... yes, I think we do."

I made a distressed noise and chewed on my lip hard enough to draw blood. The metallic taste was oddly comforting — I reckoned my idiot of a wolf was pretending like it was flockie blood in her mouth.

Stevens stopped behind us and folded his arms, making it very clear to us that he was waiting. "On your feet, Hayes."

"Yes, sir," Liam said, but he didn't rush to obey. Instead, he bought us a few more seconds by making a show of rearranging his knife and fork.

Will and Lin were saying a rather sloppy goodbye beside us. I was beginning to wonder if mated couples in packs were more touchy-feely or these two were just weird. If it was the former, we might be in trouble.

Liam seemed to think the same. He leaned in close to me and put his mouth beside my ear to whisper, "You'll be alright, Eva. We just have to be miserable for a few hours — that's all. Okay?"

I stared at him. Normally, I could get some reassurance from his wolf, but the pill had dulled that. The aura of fierceness which usually surrounded him like a second skin was gone altogether, but his eyes ... well, they were still plenty fierce. He'd be okay, and he'd make sure I was, too.

"Okay," I mumbled.

He stayed a moment longer — for the time it took to squeeze my fingers beneath the table, and then he was on his way. I watched him and Will and the Delta walk away with a horrible feeling of foreboding.

How long could we possibly keep this up?

***

A few minutes later, I wandered into the kitchen with the demeanour of a lost sheep. There were so many people moving in so many different directions all at once that I didn't dare cross the threshold. I just hovered awkwardly in the doorway.

It wasn't long before a tough-looking woman with greying hair came to frown at me. "New girl?"

I nodded.

"Good. I'm Maia, and I'm in charge here," she said. "And your name is...?"

"Eva."

"Eva," the woman repeated steadily. A frown had crossed her face, and there was a sadness to it I didn't quite understand. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. And maybe she had — I was pretty sure my grandma had come from this pack. "Well, follow me, and I'll show you what's what."

I stuck to her like glue as she led me through the room, introducing me to everyone and explaining where things were kept. There were so many people. So many names to learn. I knew I wouldn't stand a chance of remembering them all tomorrow, so I just avoided using people's names altogether.

I hated kitchen work, as it turned out. Instead of just pointing me towards a chopping board and putting a knife in my hand, which would have been boring but doable, Maia told me to make a 'cheese sauce.'

Sauces were flavoured liquids, and melted cheese was definitely a liquid with cheese flavouring, so you'd think that might be okay. It wasn't. The old woman tutted at me and ordered me to cook some sausages instead. It turned out that skewering them and toasting them over the blue fire which came out the top of the cooker was not considered acceptable.

"Useless girl," Maia snapped, dragging me away by my elbow. "Go and help with the dishes, and try not to touch anything."

It was different, somehow, being shouted at here. Back at camp, I almost revelled in criticism and made a point of doing things terribly. But when you were actually trying your best and you weren't allowed to shout back ... well, I didn't like it. Especially when the other girls all turned to stare at me.

I traipsed into the room full of sinks. There were machines that did the plates and cutlery and stuff like that, but there was a never-ending flood of saucepans and Tupperware to wash by hand. This job seemed to be used as a punishment — the girl I was paired with told me she had been sentenced to a week in here for 'claiming that bicarbonate of soda and baking powder were the same thing.'

Punishment, my ass. I didn't mind it, to be honest. Hannah had shown me how sinks worked in the lodge, so nothing went disastrously wrong, and I was away from all the judging eyes. We were all screw-ups in here. No one seemed to mind when I added too much washing-up liquid and got bubbles all over the floor.

"I didn't know we were having new people," my partner told me as she helped me wipe the foam from my shoes. "Where did you come from?"

I chewed on my lip. "New Dawn. Just arrived today."

"Cool. I grew up in Riverside. Chances are we bumped into each other at one of the full moon parties..."

"Maybe," I agreed. I would have to tread carefully here. Riverside and New Dawn were the only two packs in the north who shared a border, and they were close allies. I was willing to bet this girl knew more about my 'birth pack' than I did. So yeah — shit.

"I don't remember you from school," she murmured, her forehead creased.

"No, I was..." I thought furiously for a moment. "I wasn't very well when I was younger, so I was taught at home mostly."

Thank you, Eira, for that little spark of inspiration.

The girl chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

The time had come to put my arms into the washing-up bowl, so I yanked my sleeves up to my elbows without thinking much about it. The girl's eyes snapped straight to the web of white scars which covered the golden skin.

Uh oh. Flockies were told to look out for this kind of thing. I knew that, and I knew what must have been running through her head. My tan was suspicious enough as it was. Why was I such a dumbass?

I offered her my best shy, terrified smile and spat out the first nonsensical explanation which popped into my head. "Yeah, it's not pretty, is it? I was ... uh— I got caught up in a rogue attack when I was a kid. Three weeks in intensive care and ... well, they said I'm lucky to be alive."

"Oh, gosh. I didn't mean to stare," she stammered out, clearly having swallowed my bullshit. "Just when I thought rogues couldn't get any worse... They're foul, don't you think?"

I turned back to the sink to hide the scowl which had appeared unbidden.

"Mm," I ground out. "Horrible creatures."

"Speaking of which..." she murmured, and I followed her gaze. She was looking out of the window. Near the trees, two Silver Lake fighters and two men with the uniform of the anti-rogue patrols were frog-marching someone in handcuffs.

My heart stopped in my chest. It took me a moment to squint at the figure and be sure it wasn't Rhodri, who was camped just over the border. His face was so bloodied that I couldn't recognise him that way, but I could tell this man was too short and dark-haired to be my cousin.

"I thought your prison was under the pack house," I murmured, because they were heading away from us.

"It is," the girl said. "They're taking him towards the lake. They put them up against the wall and shoot them."

Oh. Okay. They were going to murder him. And I had to stand and watch. Awesome. He was alone, and I sincerely doubted he had even been on Silver Lake land, but what the hell did they care? One less rogue in the world could only be a good thing.

"Without a trial?" I asked. It was the closest to a complaint that I could safely get.

"Yeah. Pack law is great and all, but Mason prefers to do the paperwork after they're dead. Sometimes they'll spend a few days in the cells for interrogation, and sometimes we keep the youngest ones for even longer, because ... well, they'll talk and keep talking when you put the screws to them."

Youngest ones? I was pretty sure she meant kids. Somehow, it was starting to sound like being shot in the head upon arrival was the best option.

"I only know all this because my father runs the prison," she said breezily, like she hadn't just been talking about torturing children. "My last pack wasn't much different, to be honest. Is New Dawn really so high and mighty? Don't they ever bend the rules?"

There was enough bite in her voice that I might have gotten offended had I actually given a shit about New Dawn. They were enablers, and that made them as bad as the other packs in my eyes. And yeah, maybe Hayden was okay, but Hayden wasn't in charge right now, was he?

"Not that I've seen," I muttered. "But what do I know? I'm just a girl."

She missed the bitterness altogether and folded her arms across her chest. "Well, I hope they do. If you're not hard on rogues, they just take advantage. A little bit of brutality goes a long way."

Actually, we tended to take offence when people tortured and killed our friends, so the 'deterrent' wasn't much use. If we needed quick cash, we'd go to one of the calmer packs. If we were spoiling for a fight, we'd come to Silver Lake.

I looked back at the forest. The prisoner and his escort had long since disappeared, but I couldn't seem to wrench my thoughts away. We weren't here to save one man. We were here to stop this for good. It didn't make it any easier.

***

It was nearly eleven by the time Liam came back to our room, sweaty and exhausted. He had a nasty bruise across his cheekbone and blood under his nose. He went straight to the bed and collapsed onto it.

I abandoned a mug of tea to pad over. "Are you okay?"

"Mm," he muttered. "Tired. I think I'll just crash, if that's cool with you."

"Don't you want to take a shower first?" I asked, looking him up and down. He smelt like sweat and mud. "Or even ... I dunno ... take your shoes off?"

He pressed his face into the pillow and shook his head.

"Was it that bad?" I sighed.

"Yeah," Liam sighed. "I mean shit, Eva. Everything I ever said about flockies being lazy bastards ... I take it back."

I had to bite back a grin. I sat down on the bed beside him and started picking at the laces of his walking boots. "Oh yeah? What did they make you do?"

He lifted his head just far enough to see what I was doing before letting it fall again. "Uh. We ran patrol twice, and then we did training. It's lifting weights and running and doing ... like ... exercise. For no reason. And then when you're good and worn out, they make you fight each other. I just want to go to sleep."

"Don't you think we should put Rhodri out of his misery first?" I asked him as I tugged the boots off and tossed them to one side. It would have been good to get him out of his jeans, too, but making a grab for his belt buckle seemed ... extreme.

He groaned into the pillow. "Can't you do that?"

"Yes, I can do that, Liam, but I don't have all the top-secret information, do I? Can you stay awake for another minute?"

"I can try."

I was worried now. This wasn't like him. He was very good at being tired — he could toss and turn all night and you wouldn't know it the following morning, so I put a hand on his forehead. It was warm but not burning. I tousled his hair as I took my hand away again.

Close as I was, I couldn't help noticing that his nose was still bleeding. Maybe it was those horrible little pills he was taking for his wolf. Mam had said something about healing, hadn't she? I now wished I'd paid more attention.

"You're getting blood on my pillows," I said sternly. "Sit up for a moment."

He did, albeit very slowly and with some help from me. I threw the notebook and pen onto his lap and let him start scribbling away while I curled up beside him. It helped to get all the numbers out while they were still fresh. We weren't here to spy, but if we were going to be sleepers we might as well take advantage.

And while he wrote, I reached across a somewhat rusty mind-link to find my cousin. He was just across the border — three miles away at most, so it didn't take much effort to connect.

"Eva," Rhodri drawled. "Still alive?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm fine."

"Sick. Maybe your parents will stop pestering me now," he said, the nonchalant words so at odds with the relief that I could feel flooding down the link. "And Kendrick?"

I smiled despite myself. "Very sleepy."

"That's in the job description."

"Rhodri."

He growled a little down the link. "What? I'm not allowed to make jokes?"

"Not shitty ones," I muttered. "Make yourself useful and patch Nia in, yeah? We've got some things to relay."

He grumbled at me, but I did feel the link expand to include my cousin, who wasn't far away either. Even mentally, she was such a calm, capable presence that I felt all the tension leaving my body. Unlike Rhodri, she didn't need me to tell her that I was alright — she could feel that easily enough for herself.

"Evening, puppies," she said. "What can I help you with today?"

I basked in that steady, familiar voice. It had been nearly two weeks since we'd seen her. "Actually, we're going to help you."

Nia seemed to relax, and her mind brightened. "That's a nice change. You got some juicy flockie secrets for me?"

"Yep. Apparently, there's seventy-one fighters, fourteen of whom are semi-retired," I read out. "Your handwriting is shit, Kendrick. What's that number?"

"Three?"

I put the notebook down. "Are you asking me or telling me?"

He made a face and shrugged helplessly. "Let's go with three."

"Okay. Thirty patrols a day when it's raining. Twenty when it's not. Times are random, obviously, but they like to do one at sunset and one at sunrise."

He carried on writing, and I carried on reading. It was mostly just times at which the patrols would be going tomorrow and everything else he'd managed to glean. Rhodri accepted the flood of information with a forced sort of patience. I could tell he wanted to hear more about our first day, but I was making it very clear through the link that I wasn't in the mood to relive it.

It was Nia who asked the questions — who prodded deeper when Liam joined the link to explain their protocols. There was still a lot he didn't know, obviously, but every little snippet of information helped.

His mind was clouded and hazy with exhaustion. I could feel the link shaking as he fought for concentration, and soon it got so bad that Nia leant across to take the slack. He was beyond shattered, I realised, and I wasn't sure if he'd manage another day of this.

"We'll come raiding the day after tomorrow," Nia told us when the conversation finally fizzled out. "Not sure what time exactly, but I'll check and make sure Liam's off duty first. Don't want to end up fighting him."

"Don't want your arse kicked, you mean," Liam murmured.

Gentle derision washed back across the link, but she decided to humour him. "Yeah. That's the reason. Get some sleep now, kiddo. I can feel you yawning a mile off."

She gave us both a little push to illustrate the point, and I let the link close happily enough. It didn't take me long to swap my flockie clothes for an oversized shirt. By the time I slipped back into our bed, Liam's eyes were closed.

Normally, we'd keep to ourselves. There was plenty of space to spread out. But I needed to smell like him. Being coated in each other's scents was the only way we could disguise our fake mate bond, so I wriggled closer until I could hear his heartbeat. He seemed happy enough to let me use his arm for a pillow.

With every second that passed, the steady thudding of his heart slowed down a little more. Five minutes of that and our link began to drift shut. And for the first time ever, he was asleep before I was.