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I find Evelyn Sorrell against the east wall.

Black dress. Plain black mask on a stick, the kind you hold, the kind you can lower.

She lowers it.

"You've been in this room since seven o'clock."

"Yes."

"You let me refuse your gates this afternoon and you were already coming."

"Yes."

My wolf goes for her and I keep him behind my teeth, because there are three hundred people watching and about half of them still think the wolves are a costume.

"She watched you," I say. "Ten minutes ago. She stood in that circle and watched you tell her mother to go home and be ordinary."

"I know what she watched. I was standing here."

"You could have said something."

"To whom?" Evelyn's face doesn't do anything at all. "Seraphine Crowell didn't lie to her. That's the trouble with the woman. She's never had to."

"Francesca Bell asked you for help."

The name goes into her like a splinter. It's the first thing I've ever seen get through.

"Francesca asked me to make her daughter safe," she says. "If I had come for Maren at four, she would have been ours by nine, and she would have been alive at ninety, and she'd have opened nothing and known nothing and she'd have called it a good life, because that's what people call the life they get." She sets the mask down on the ledge. "Your father would have called that a kindness too."

"Don't ever talk about my father."

"You brought him up first, years ago, when you decided every choice you'd ever make would be the opposite of his." She looks past me at the circle. "I can't break that, Alpha. Neither can you. At midnight she'll be able to break it herself, and then we'll all find out who and what she is. I'm here for that. I'm not going to pretend it's for her."

At least it's the truth.

It's the first honest thing anybody in the coven has said to me in six months, and I'd rather have had the lie.

Eleven fifty-one.

I know because I can see the phone in Maren's hand through the barrier. She's holding it the way you hold something that's counting down.

My wolf has been saying the same word for four minutes.

Claim.

No.

Claim her. Now. She'd feel it. Through anything. She'd feel us and she'd come back.

He's not wrong. That's what nobody understands about him. He’s never once wrong about what would work.

It doesn't need my hands to claim her. It's been sitting in my chest and it has never needed my permission or hers. I could reach for it right now, in a ballroom, through a wall, and put something in her that she never asked for, and she would turn around and look at me and it would hold.

It would hold for the rest of her life.

I know exactly how long that is.

My father called it love right up until the day he died and he was proud of it. I have spent years trying to do the right thing. If I do this now to save her life then Seraphine Crowell is right about all of us.