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"I wasn't thinking that."

"You were a little bit."

"I was not."

Tamsin gave me a look.

Then she set down her fork and said, more quietly, "I liked you when you were a Hollow. That's the difference. Remember who liked you when you were a Hollow."

I looked at her sitting there with pastry on her chin, annoyed on my behalf and completely certain of herself, and suddenly my eyes started to sting.

"I will," I said.

There was something else bothering me too, although I didn't tell her about it.

On Saturday morning, I opened the door of the tower and found the top step empty.

There was no rose.

I stood there in my socks for much longer than I should have, staring at the bare stone.

For three months,I had complained about them and pretended I didn't care who was leaving them. Apparently, none of that had stopped me from expecting one.

I went back inside, found the last dead rose, and dropped it into the trash.

A few seconds later, I took it back out.

I pressed it carefully between the pages of On the Sleeping Beast and closed the book before I could spend too much time wondering why I was doing it.

The moon was full again that weekend, the fourth full moon since I had arrived on Ironmoor, and for three nights the whole island changed with it. Doors stayed shut. Voices carried differently through the halls. Everyone seemed restless as always.

I spent those nights behind my bolted door with Silas sitting on the landing outside and the wren perched on the sill.

It was the first Moonfever I barely noticed.

There were too many other things in my head.

Jax found me the following Wednesday at the edge of the Hollow Wood.

I had started walking there in the late afternoons, when most people were still at lessons or dinner and the paths were quiet. It had become one of the few places on the island where I could go without feeling watched except the Archives.

That afternoon, I was standing beneath the first of the tall pines, looking between the trunks and thinking about the black wolf I had seen pacing the ridge above the river, when something warm and heavy dropped across my shoulders from behind.

A voice spoke directly into my ear.

"Boo."

I screamed.

Jax started laughing so hard that he eventually gave up trying to stand and sat down in the grass.

"I hate you," I told him.

"You don't."

He grinned up at me from the ground, already covered in pine needles.

"You've been avoiding me for a week, reina. Ever since the Proving. Everyone wants to talk to the famous wolf-girl now, and apparently I'm the only person who can't get near her."