My Alpha Left Me to Die in a Silver Cage, So I Chose the Enemy Who Opened It

Leah's POV

The sun was half gone behind the eastern wall when Mason came back up the steps for me.

I'd made it to my knees on my own. That was as far as I got. He took my arm, and another guard took the other, and they lifted me the rest of the way so the pack could see me standing.

The second they let go of my elbows, my legs started to fold. I grabbed the iron rail and locked my fingers around it. The metal was so cold it burned, but it held me up, and right then that was all I needed from it.

Darian stood at the center of the altar with a scroll in one hand. Allison stood beside him.

She'd changed again. The gown was midnight-blue velvet with white fur at the collar and cuffs, fitted at the waist and long enough to brush the frost. I knew that gown. Leah had stood in a fitting room for an hour while a seamstress pinned the hem, and she'd turned in front of the mirror and pictured exactly this yard, this crowd, and Darian's hand reaching for hers at the Winter Rite.

It fit Allison better than it would have fit me. Somebody had taken it in.

"By the authority of this pack," Darian said, his voice carrying to the gate, "the marriage contract between the Voss and Marsh families is dissolved. Leah Marsh is cast out of Ridgefall and all Greyfell lands, effective at sundown."

Somebody at the back murmured. Most of them just watched me, waiting.

I knew what they were waiting for. The book had told me. Leah had dropped to her knees on this stone and begged until her voice gave out.

*Lyra.*

Nothing. No faint sound. No stirring. Only my own breathing, rough and too loud, rasping in and out past the collar.

"Where's the decree?" I asked.

Darian frowned. "What?"

"The banishment. The actual document." I swallowed, and the silver shifted. "If you're sending me away, put it in writing."

"It's written." He lifted the scroll.

"That's a speech. I want terms." I made myself look at the elder standing to his left, a gray-bearded man holding a ledger and a pen, the official witness for every rite I'd ever seen here. "The contract is over. Nobody hunts me. Nobody summons me back under pack law. My personal belongings are returned, and any records with my name on them are released to me. Everything in that bag." I nodded at the canvas sack at Allison's feet. "Written down. Witnessed. Sealed."

The witness glanced at Darian. He didn't uncap his pen.

Darian laughed, short and disbelieving. "Leah, you don't have a house. You don't have money. You don't have a pack after tonight. Where exactly do you think you're going?"

I didn't answer that. Miriam's transfer form was still tucked flat inside my sleeve, and I kept my arm pressed against my side.

"Answer me one thing instead," I said. "You don't want me. You've told everyone here you don't want me. So are you going to stop me from leaving, too?"

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

Down in the yard, people started looking at each other. A woman near the front leaned toward the man beside her and whispered. I saw the moment it shifted, the moment the story they'd come to watch stopped making sense. The clingy girl who couldn't let him go was standing in chains, asking for the paperwork to walk out.

"Once you cast me out," I said, "you don't get to call me back."

"Nobody's calling you back," Allison said lightly. "Darian, this is just her way of making it about her again."

"Then it costs him nothing to write it down."

The witness shifted his weight. Darian's eyes cut to him, then to the crowd, then back to me. His jaw was set so hard I could see the muscle jump.

He handed the scroll to Allison without looking at her.

Then he took one step toward me and held out his hand.

Open. Palm up. Close enough that I could have reached it without letting go of the rail.

"Come down from here," he said, quieter, the way he'd talked to me beside the cage that first night. "We'll go inside and talk about this like adults. You don't need to do any of this."

My fingers moved.

I didn't tell them to. The first two fingers of my right hand lifted off the iron and curled toward his palm. I couldn't stop them. And then my eyes were wet, and the tears were running down my face faster than I could blink, dripping off my chin and landing on the frosted stone in small dark spots.

It wasn't guilt. I knew it wasn't. It was eight years old and freezing by the river. It was a body that remembered one warm pair of hands and had never stopped reaching for them.

He saw my fingers move. Something eased in his face, like he'd been sure all along.

I flattened my hand back against the rail.

I pressed down until the cold bit into my palm and my fingers stopped shaking. Then I turned my head toward the witness.

"Please add the release clause," I said. "Free departure. No pursuit, no recall. Write it in."

The elder looked at Darian's open hand, still hanging in the air between us. Then he uncapped his pen.

"I'm asking to leave," I told Darian. My voice was wrecked, but it didn't break. "Let that be the last thing I ask of you."

His hand stayed there one second longer. Then it dropped to his side.

His face went dark, colder than I'd seen it even in the yard at dawn. He watched the witness's pen scratch across the ledger, line after line, and when the elder held out the brass seal, Darian took it. He turned it over in his fingers once, the wolf's head catching the last orange light.

He lifted it over the page.

Tires screamed outside the eastern gate.

Every head in the yard turned. An engine roared and cut off, and then a car door slammed hard enough to echo off the wall. A guard yelled something, and somebody else yelled back, and the gate rattled on its chain.

It didn't stay shut.

Miriam came through first, her medical bag swinging at her hip, her short gray hair flattened by the wind. A man walked beside her, tall, in a long black wool coat that hung open over a dark suit. He wasn't hurrying. He didn't have to. The crowd split ahead of him like nobody had decided to move.

Four guards in dark gear followed him in and stopped at the bottom of the altar steps. They didn't come up.

He did.

He held a single sheet of paper in one hand, folded lengthwise. I recognized the stamp on the corner. Miriam's clinic. The same transfer request she'd pushed into my sleeve.

Darian lowered the seal. "Ronan."

The man didn't answer him. He came up the last step and looked at me, not my face, but the left side of my neck, where Miriam's lining had gone stiff and black with blood. He studied it for a long moment, and his mouth thinned.

Darian reached for the chain hanging from my collar.

Ronan put his hand flat in the way. He didn't grab Darian or push him. He just stood there, his palm between Darian's fingers and the silver links, and Darian stopped.

"This is my pack's rite," Darian said. "You have no authority here. What gives you the right to walk onto my altar and take someone?"

Ronan held up the transfer order so the witness could read it.

"She's coming with me, Darian," he said. "Her wolf is dying."

He looked back at me then. His eyes were very steady.

"Lyra," he said. "Her name is Lyra. Isn't it?"

He knew her name.

I wanted to answer him. I turned inward, the way I'd done a hundred times since I woke up in the snow, and reached for her. For the faint sound, the stirring, the bubbles underwater. Anything.

*Lyra. Somebody came. Somebody's here.*

My chest was quiet.

Not faint. Not far away.

Empty.