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She's small. She comes in shorter than I am, in a gray wool dress and flat shoes, with dark hair cut blunt at the jaw and going white at one temple.

No mask. No jewelry. Bare hands.

She looks like someone's aunt who came to visit.

She smells like the char on my front door.

Lila walks in behind her.

Red coat. The coat she always wears, over a black dress I helped her pick, and no mask on her face at all, and she looks straight at me before she looks anywhere else in the room.

Something in my chest folds in half.

Gage moves in front of me. The sound that comes out of him is definitely a growl. Eight wolves converge on the front hall from three directions, and the guests scatter back from them in a wave, and someone screams into a cupped hand.

Seraphine Crowell raises both palms, unhurried.

"There are three hundred people in this room and a dozen of them are children," she says. Her voice is ordinary. Warm, even. "I'd rather nobody's mother spend tomorrow at a funeral. That includes yours, Alpha."

"Get out of my town," Gage says.

"In a while." She looks past his shoulder at me and her whole face opens up. "Maren Bell."

"You're Seraphine."

"I am."

"You look like a librarian."

Her mouth curves. "I was, for eleven years. It's a good job."

The candles hold. Nobody moves. Two hundred masks in this room and every eye behind them is on the small woman in the sensible shoes.

"You have questions," she says. "I'll answer all of them. That will be new for you."

I don't trust it for a second, so I test it.

"Did you send the woman to my window?"

"Yes."

"The necklace that put a chain around my throat?"

"Yes. That one I regret. It was cruder than I wanted and it hurt you more than it needed to."

"The nine on the grass."

"A test." She looks pleased. "You understood it. Most people don't."

My mouth has gone dry. "Then you already know I'm not joining you."

"I know Evelyn Sorrell told you what happened to the last one of you." She takes two steps into the ballroom and the wolves let her, because Gage hasn't told them not to. "Did she tell you about the seven before her?"

The floor tilts.

"That's a lie."

"It isn't, and you'd know that if you could feel anything tonight." She says it gently. "They don't hate us, Maren. That's the part nobody explains right. They're kind about it. They give you a room and a garden and a coven full of women who bring you tea, and nobody ever says the word prisoner out loud, and you die at eighty-one having opened nothing at all. The burnings only happen when a woman refuses them."