Chapter Two: "Six Months of Love and He Never Asked My Last Name

NEVA POV --- Let me tell you how I ended up here, because it is a story that requires context or it just sounds like self-destruction, which — fine, fair, but there are *layers.* My name is Neva Aris. My sister's name is Lera Aris, and she is the kind of beautiful that makes people walk into doorframes. She's two years older, three inches taller, and has always occupied exactly the kind of space I disappear from. Not on purpose — that's the thing people never believe. She doesn't try to outshine me. I'm just not bright enough for anyone to notice when she's in the room. My mother used to say we complemented each other. I used to think she meant it kindly. I'm still deciding. --- Six months ago, I was living in the Aris packlands doing what I'd always done: making myself useful in ways nobody tracked and absent in ways nobody noticed. I helped in the medical wing. Not as a healer — I don't have that gift — but I had steady hands and a talent for reading what people needed before they asked. The pack medic, old Dr. Parren, used to say I had the most useful quality a caregiver could possess: I didn't take up space. He meant it as a compliment. I've been unpacking it ever since. When word came that the Vrel Alpha had been attacked — a rogue ambush, three wolves, one of them silver-armed — and that the injuries had left him without his sight, every packmaster in range started the polite political shuffling of resources. Offering healers, aid, whatever cemented goodwill with the Vrel lands. My packmaster offered me. Not because I was the best. Because I was available. Because I was the kind of asset you could send and not miss. "It's an honor," my packmaster told me, with the energy of someone who very much was not going himself. "Of course," I said, with the energy of someone who knew exactly what she was. I packed in an hour. I didn't tell Lera — she was three territories away on some social visit that had been going on for months. I left a note on her bed that said *I've gone to the Vrel lands. I'll write when I arrive.* She didn't reply for two months. I assumed she was busy. I chose to assume she was busy. I was very committed to that assumption. --- The first time I met Caius Vrel, he threw a water glass at my head. Not at me specifically. He didn't know I was there — that was the problem. I had let myself into his rooms to replace the bedside lamp his previous attendant had apparently knocked over during a disagreement, and I moved too quietly, and when he sensed someone in the room and I didn't speak fast enough, his wolf reacted before he did. I ducked. The glass hit the wall. Water everywhere. "Who's there," he said, and it wasn't a question, it was a warning. "Neva Aris," I said, from behind the door I'd partially hidden myself behind. "I'm here about the lamp." A long pause. "About the lamp," he repeated. "The one that's broken. On the floor. There are also some fairly sharp pieces near your left foot, so if you could—" "I know about the glass." "Oh." I peered around the doorframe. He was standing at the center of the room in the dark like he was waiting for an attack that hadn't come yet. His face was closed and furious and — I noticed, unhelpfully — extraordinarily structured. "I can come back." "You're already here." "I can be somewhere else very quickly." Something in his expression fractured, just slightly. Not softened — fractured. Like a wall developing a crack it hadn't authorized. "Fix the lamp," he said. So I did. I cleaned up the glass. I replaced the lamp. I moved quietly and spoke only when necessary and narrated my movements so he always knew where I was, because I figured out in about thirty seconds that what threatened him was not being in the dark — it was not knowing what was *in* the dark. I left without being asked to leave and came back the next morning with tea. He didn't throw anything that time. I counted it as progress. --- Four months of progress look like this: I know that he sleeps with the window cracked regardless of the temperature, because the cold helps him think and thinking is the only thing he can still fully control. I know he hates being read to — not because he can't stand the sound, but because he needs to feel the pages himself, and losing that is a grief he hasn't named yet. I know he walks better with a specific rhythm of sound — my voice, just talking, low and ordinary — than he does in silence, because silence in his condition sounds like threat. I know he finds my humor disarming in a way he's never admitted and probably never will. I know he has a scar on his right hand, crossing the knuckle of his middle finger, from something that happened before the ambush. I know because I've mapped his hands when they're in mine — him not asking for help, me not calling it that — guiding him through unfamiliar spaces. I know all of this, and I have made myself absolutely invaluable, and I have done it so quietly and so thoroughly that nobody in this pack has stopped to notice that I'm also desperately, stupidly in love with a man who says my name like it's a sound he's used to making. He does not love me. I know this. I am clear-eyed about this. I am so clear-eyed about this that I can acknowledge it and keep going, because that is what I do — I keep going, I keep being useful, I keep handing the cup over with the handle turned right. He says a different name in his sleep. I know this too. --- The pack doctor's name is Hew, and he has the kind of face that's been delivering news for so long it's stopped adjusting to the content. He finds me in the kitchen — my domain, the one room in this house where I am undeniably in charge — and he sets his bag on the counter and says, "The imaging came back." I keep stirring. "The optic nerve is regenerating," he says. "Faster than the previous scan suggested." The spoon goes still. "How long?" I ask. "At this rate?" Hew tilts his head. "Days, Neva. Not weeks. *Days.*" I turn back to the pot. I stir. The smell of the soup fills the kitchen — something warm and ordinary that the world is apparently not interested in being today. "He'll want to know," I say. "He'll want to hear it from you," Hew says, which is interesting because it confirms something I've been not-confirming for weeks: that everyone in this house has noticed something I have not figured out how to name. Hew picks up his bag. He pauses at the door. "He's going to have decisions to make when he can see again. Pack decisions. Succession decisions." A pause with weight behind it. "Personal decisions." I nod, like I know what to do with that. He leaves. I keep stirring. Outside the kitchen window, across the pack grounds, I can see the long road that leads to the main gate. There is a car on it. A car I don't recognize. A car that parks, and lets out a passenger, and the passenger steps into the grey afternoon light and tips her head back like she's tasting the air — and even from this distance, even through glass, I recognize the way she moves. The way she always moved into rooms I was already standing in. Lera. My sister is here. And nobody told me she was coming.