Maeve
Soren rises and walks to the pile of blankets scattered on the damp ground. Blankets that still smell like him, like us. He pulls a knife from the backpack, sliding the blade’s ridge over his palm–not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to feel it, likely imagining his own death by my hand.
The note remains where I dropped it, the ink now bleeding across the water-logged graph paper.
“My father,” he begins, “was an abusive, alcoholic gambler with a pension for driving his fists into my mother’s face. She wasn’t much better.” He walks toward me, twirling the knife and extending its hilt in my direction. “When he got tired of beating her, he liked to take it out on me. But I liked to hit back.”
I swallow hard as I curl my fingers around the hilt of the knife, and he lets go, but my chest is tight, and the blade is a dead weight as my hand falls to my lap. He holds my gaze for a few seconds before sitting on the ground a few feet away, his back against one of the decaying wooden crates. He allows the rain to rush over the cabin for a few moments before continuing. “He left one night to spend what little money we had for food and didn’t come back. I was ten.”
“Where was this?”
“A little village outside of Moorn,” he replies with a sigh, summoning fading memories of a landscape of rolling, golden hills and a long stretch of highway that flash behind his eyes. I know Moorn. I’ve been there, seen the empty stretches of road and not much else. “We were rogues. My dad wasn’t wanted by any Alphas. He had nothing to offer.”
“You’re from Crescent Falls?”
He nods, meeting my eyes. “I was born there.”
I try not to be shocked. I try not to feel anything right now, especially not the dull ache of heartbreak coursing through my bones. I try to just… listen because I desperately want to know why this brave, proud man became what he is so I can… believe it. So I can rise and drive this knife into his heart knowing he’s evil, that he can never change, and that he deserves death despite my overwhelming feelings that are begging me to turn the other cheek.
“My mom was from here, from the Roguelands. When that asshole didn’t come back, she left, taking me with her, saying we had family here, but by that she meant… she meant my older brother, her first son. Thomas. We had different fathers. Tom was six years older than me and already out on his own. He had a place in Twin Rivers, and she dropped me off on his doorstep–cold, hungry, and sick—and just walked away. I never saw her again, and Tom… well, he had money. I suddenly had food on the table and shoes without holes in them. I gained weight, grew a few inches. He got me into a local school while he… worked. I didn’t ask where the money came from. I didn’t care. All I cared about was not being hungry anymore. But I was… fucked up, Maeve.”
I’m not even breathing. There isn’t a single thought in my head when he continues. “I got into a fight at school when I was twelve. A really bad fight. I nearly killed another kid. He deserved it, in my defense. He’d been picking on some of the girls, and I got to the point where I couldn’t fucking take it anymore. The teachers wouldn’t do anything. My classmates just stood there. So I beat the absolute shit out of him. I was still picking his teeth out of my knuckles when a warrior came to get me. I was in trouble. Big trouble. The local Beta and school master called in the troops because the kid I beat up was the Alpha’s grandson, and I was taken to some holding facility for people like me–older kids, troubled kids. Kids without family to keep tabs on them. Tom didn’t even try to get me out. He sent a single letter telling me not to say shit about where we were living or where he got all of his mysterious money, so I kept my mouth shut. And then… I kept getting into fights, more and more, until the people running the place couldn’t keep me there anymore. I was smaller than the rest of the kids, but they picked on me because they knew I’d fight back. It was entertainment for them. For the facility, I was a liability, but there was someone who didn’t see me that way.”
“Who?” My voice cracks over the word.
“Your dad.”
“Wh-what?”
He nods, his expression distant and grave as he smooths his hands down his thighs.
“One of the guards at the place sent me to Moonrise under the guise of having me detained there, deeming me unwell, an actual danger to society. In reality, I’d been secretly recruited, I suppose, and thrust into wolf training at the age of twelve, the youngest in my class by several years. I had a natural gift. Elevated senses, they called it. The witches who run the academy for wolf arts had my blood tested to see if I was some kind of hybrid, but I was just an angry kid. An abused kid. A kid who knew hunger and was willing to do what he needed to do to never feel that way again.”
“My brother–he went to that training center, but not until he was fourteen. Blake, too.”
“Then you know what it's like.”
“It’s brutal. It’s brutal for even the men who attend.” I whisper, tears in my eyes. “You were just a kid.”
He looks away, not wanting to lose his nerve, I suppose. I wanted everything from the beginning, and that's what I’m getting, whether we both regret it or not.
“A captain in your father’s army at the academy escalated my training. I was given tutors to help me catch up in school, but most of my time was spent training in the arena. I wasn’t anywhere near being able to shift yet, but it didn’t matter. I spent two years learning the wolf arts, hand to hand combat, and learning to fight with a variety of weapons on top of that, and by the time I was fourteen, I was on the fast track to training with the Ghosts. Not everyone is accepted into that field of training. The Ghosts are elite, the best of the best. It was all I wanted. I used to watch the Ghost trainees. I’d sit on a ledge overlooking the training grounds while they ran drills, praying for the moment I’d get my chance, and I did. I was going to be the youngest trainee accepted into the Ghosts. I met your father personally. He shook my hand.”
My fingers curl into a fist at my side as if I can feel my father’s grip there, warm and solid against my skin.
Soren clears his throat, backtracking a bit, “I met Patton there, at the training center. We were roommates. He was… just another lost boy, no parents, just happy to have a roof over his head. He was never going to get into the Ghosts, but we were best friends. We went everywhere together. He was on the academic track. He wanted to be a teacher, I guess. Compared to me, Patton was soft and kind, and that occasionally made him a target. I protected him. No one messed with him as long as I was around, and in turn, he helped me get the grades I needed to graduate early in anticipation of joining the Ghosts.”
Soren closes his eyes for a moment. The air between us is thick, the tension so heavy I’m not sure the knife in my lap would be able to slice through it. A shift in the tension in his jaw gives me a single glimpse of what’s going on in his head. He’s picking through those blurry, fractured memories of a time in his life before he wore silver.
“When I was fifteen… Tom showed up in Moonrise to visit me for the first time in three years. I’d written to him a few times, but he’d never written back. Then, all of the sudden, he was there, acting like nothing had changed, like we even knew each other to begin with, and I was… so fucking stupid, Maeve, for letting him talk me into going back to the Roguelands, just for a visit, using that weakness I felt for him, my only family, to instill the idea in my head that being a Ghost was like licking the boots of the royals who didn’t care about people like us. I visited him in Twin Rivers during the Solstice break against my better judgement. Patton came with me. We drank and partied for two weeks, spent loads of money–more money than we’d ever seen before, all supplied by Tom. I met Duke there. He was Tom’s friend, just a bit older than us. But things… stopped feeling right. The people Tom surrounded himself with were not… well. The parties often turned violent. Tom would suddenly come into obscene amounts of cash, and I’d watch him blow it in a single evening. It reminded me of my childhood. The things Tom told me to try to turn me away from a future in your father’s army started to sound wrong. So I returned to Moonrise with Patton. I finished out the next semester, and that spring, got the official notice that I was now a Ghost trainee and spent the next three months training with them.”
Soren rises, exhaling deeply before beginning to pace. Beyond the stone walls of our sanctuary, the storm carries on, funneling overhead. Thunder booms, sending a steady vibration through the cracking plaster, making the crates squeak together, but… my entire body is screaming to move, to touch him, to help him. His face is just… broken. His eyes are dark and heavy as he turns to me, saying, “I met the Viper when I was sixteen. I’d just been put on leave from Ghost training and was able to travel down to Twin Rivers for a month to visit Tom. I hadn’t heard from him all summer. I was worried, I guess. His last letter had been… frantic. I’m not sure how else to explain it, but he asked for money. I was making a little bit on the side, acting as a trainer for some of the younger boys going through the wolf arts program, but nothing substantial. I arrived in Twin Rivers by train, unable to shift yet for the journey, and he wasn’t home.”
Dread begins to prickle across my skin.
“I looked all over for him, and it turns out he’d gotten in trouble with his boss, the Viper. I didn’t know much about what he did at that point, but to be honest, I blocked it out. I knew enough to know he was doing illegal activities, likely running contraband across the border, or something, but I didn’t know the extent of it until someone came to his house shortly after I arrived, like they knew I’d be there, and brought me to the den.”
My blood runs cold as his tone drops, his gaze turning icy.
“The Viper, she…” he clicks his tongue, chuckling darkly, “she’s… my brother and Duke were partners in a business sense, I guess. They’d run errands for her, or she called it. Doing her dirty work. In return, she allowed them to live a lavish lifestyle, but you have to buy in to be protected by the Viper. I wasn’t in Tom’s life when he gave himself to her, fell into her debt, so to speak. There was a gig gone wrong shortly before I arrived, and it sounded like she was already tiring of Tom. He was on a short leash by then, old enough to shift but tethered by silver. He’d been getting too confident, taking too many risks, and when he and Duke inadvertently caused the death of four of her best men when they were caught trying to rob a train full of precious minerals heading to Crescent Falls, she made me watch when she gave Tom the option to save himself or to save Duke.”
My stomach hollows out.
“Tom begged and pleaded for his life like a coward, telling her to kill Duke, that he’d be good and do better. She killed him instead, and to be honest, I was happy for it at the time. I watched my own flesh and blood snivel like a little bitch, telling her to kill his friend.”
I close my eyes, not sure I can take anymore because I have a feeling it’s going to get far, far worse from here.
“I thought it was over then. But they wouldn’t let me leave the den. I was grabbed, thrown down, and pinned. Her cronies beat me senseless, despite the fact that I was training to be a Ghost. I still couldn’t get out. She told me that I was special to her, that when she found out Tom had a younger brother, a highly skilled warrior, that she knew she needed me, that she wanted me. That he wanted me.”
“Hannibal?”
“Yes. The Spider.”