CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
ATHENA'S POV
Mr. Falade had been talking about opportunity cost for what felt like the length of an actual economic recession.

I wasn't even sure what point he was on anymore. Something about scarcity? Something about trade-offs? My mind has been foggy all morning with thoughts of my conversation with Adam.

“And sometimes, these kinds of things are the most important to write.” Mr. Falade wore a bright smile as he scribbled a triangle on the board with shaky hands. It was easy to assume he had Parkinson’s.

My notebook had exactly four words written on it and three of them were my own name, doodled in different fonts because apparently that's what my hand does when my brain checks out of a room.

I glanced sideways at the seat that Lydia now claimed.

It was empty.

She hadn't been in first period either, and I only knew that because Dave had asked me if I'd seen her, which was… new?

New isn’t the right word but Dave asking me about Lydia’s whereabouts consistently, was new. There was a time he wouldn't have noticed if she'd combusted beside him.

I didn't have an answer for him then and I didn't have one now. It wasn't really my place to keep track of her anymore. We'd become the kind of people who used to know each other.

That thought alone was enough to make my chest ache a little and the room temperature to drop a bit, so I raised my hand, mumbled something about the bathroom, and didn't wait for Mr. Falade to fully finish nodding with the look of pity in his eyes before I was out the door.

The bathroom was empty when I pushed the door open. I ran the tap for longer than I needed to, just for something to do with my hands, and watched myself in the mirror the way I'd been doing a lot lately. Waiting to see if I looked more alive than the day before.

I doubted today would be one of those hopeful days and I was right.

I was still trying measure my eyes, when the door opened behind me.

“Sorry." Angel stood in the doorway, one hand still on the frame like she hadn't fully committed to walking in. "I saw you down the hall and I followed you.” She started and paused midway, “That's a weird thing to admit out loud, isn't it?"

"A little." I said, mostly out of surprise. Angel and I didn't do this. Of late she’s been existing more as a character in my life than a shadow of Dave that I was used to her being.

She let the door fall shut and leaned against the sinks a few feet from me, arms folding over her chest. " It's been just Dave and me at lunch at the library. I was wondering when you and Lydia left."

“I’m at the cafeteria now.”

“With Lydia?”

“No.”

“You two used to do everything together.”

I focused very hard on drying my hands. "Things change.” Especially since I was rejected.

"That's not an answer?" it was a question, not a statement.

"It's the only one I've got."

She studied me for a second like she was deciding whether to push, and then, mercifully, she let it go with a small shrug. "Okay. Fair enough. Not my business."

I appreciated that more than she probably knew. I didn't have it in me to explain Lydia's mother's voice through a cracked door, or the exact shape of the silence that had lived between Lydia and me ever since. Some things you can't say out loud without them becoming more real than you can currently afford.

Angel exhaled and glanced at the door like she was checking it was still shut, and something about the care in the gesture made my stomach tighten.

"That's not actually why I followed you in here." she admitted.

Who would’ve thought? "Okay?"

"There's something I wanted to share with you. Someone I know actually. A matrix." She said the word carefully. "She's been bred. And marked. And she's alive. Doing well in fact."

I already understood breeding better than she probably assumed I did. But she did not need to know that. "How did it happen?" I said, and I heard the disbelief in my own voice. Considering how my own status kept fluctuating. "I mean…I know how breeding works, but how did they manage to make it successful."

"I don’t really know, but it held for her. She's on the other side of it now. And she's willing to talk to you. Tell you what to expect, what to ask for, what to refuse and if you should consider being bred."

Hope is a strange thing to feel over a bathroom sink, but I felt it anyway, a small stubborn flicker of it, right under the fear that had been living in my chest since the night Blake looked at me like I was a mistake the moon goddess had made.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked before I could stop myself. "You and I aren't exactly close. The most I know about you is your name and your mate."

"Because I watched you get thinner every week and nobody around you seemed to have anything real to offer except sympathy. And I had something real."

She pulled a folded scrap of paper from her jacket pocket, already prepared, which meant she'd planned this before she ever followed me through that door. "There's a bookstore two streets down from the old textile mill. Ask for Ashley. Tell her I sent you. She won't talk to anyone who just walks in cold."

I took the paper like it might dissolve if I held it wrong.

"You can't tell anyone about this," she added "Not Dave. Not Lydia, obviously. Not your family, not yet. If it gets back to the wrong pack that she's out here talking to matrixes about surviving breeding, it puts her in danger. It puts a lot of people in danger."

I understood why she said that. Packs were against the reproduction of weaker wolves. They wished our kind could die off.

"I won't say anything. I promise." And I meant it.

"Okay." She nodded, mostly to herself, like she was talking herself into having already said too much.

"Angel." I called her before she left the bathroom and waited until she looked at me. "How do you know her? People don't just happen to know someone who survived a breeding. That's not information you pick up secondhand."

She was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer at all.

"Because she's my sister." Came her answer.