Chapter 47: None Of Your Business

Chapter 47: None Of Your Business
The hall had transformed completely.

Whatever stiffness the formal ceremony had carried was gone. The long tables were now lined with food and drink, servants moving between them with trays and pitchers. Music had started somewhere near the back of the hall, low and steady, the kind that sat underneath conversation rather than competing with it. People had loosened. Cups were being refilled. Laughter was returning.

And underneath all of it, like a current nobody was naming out loud, the whispers were still moving.

Olivia could feel them the moment she walked back in with Harris and Cassandra. Not one pair of eyes. Not two. Multiple. People looking and then looking away and then looking back again with expressions that ranged from curious to reverent to something she did not have a word for yet.

Cassandra noticed within thirty seconds.

She said nothing. But her eyes were following every gaze, cataloguing quietly, the way she always did when she was collecting information and had not yet decided what to do with it.

They found a spot near the eastern wall, the three of them, and stood with drinks they were not particularly drinking while the hall moved around them.

Then the door of the side room opened.

Kayla walked out.

She was upright, which was more than Olivia had expected. But the patches covering the left side of her face and the thick bandaging visible at her shoulder told the full story of what the healers had spent the last hour doing. She moved carefully, like someone whose pride was doing more structural work than her body at that particular moment.

Cassandra went very still.

Then she turned slowly to Olivia.

"Am I seeing correctly?" she said. Her voice was extremely controlled. "Is that not Kayla? Alpha Damian's Kayla? The same Kayla who made your life in Silverline a living nightmare?"

"Yes," Olivia said.

"With patches all over her face."

"Yes."

"And a bandaged shoulder."

"Yes."

Cassandra turned back to look at Kayla. A slow smile spread across her face that had absolutely nothing warm in it.

"That," Cassandra said with deep satisfaction, "serves her right. Look at her face. Look at it, Liv. Every single patch on that woman's face is justice."

"Cassandra," Olivia said.

"I am just observing," Cassandra said. "I am standing here observing justice." She turned to Harris. "What happened to her?"

Harris looked at her pleasantly. "Ask your friend."

Cassandra turned to Olivia. "What happened to her?"

"It is a long story," Olivia said.

"I have time."

"It is a very long story."

"Olivia–"

"Later, Cass."

Cassandra looked between the two of them with narrowed eyes. Then she looked back at Kayla. Then at the people around them who were still occasionally glancing at Olivia with those unreadable expressions.

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, very casually: "People keep looking at you."

"Do they," Olivia said.

"They do." Cassandra tilted her head. "They have been looking since we walked in. Not rudely but like you are something they are not sure they have seen before."

Olivia said nothing.

"Mmhm," Cassandra said. "Very long story indeed."

++++

Josh came down from the stage and crossed the room toward them.

The crowd parted slightly without him asking, the way it always did.

He stopped in front of Olivia and looked at the untouched cup in her hand and then at the food table several feet away.

"You have not eaten," he said.

"I was not very hungry, your majesty."

"You have not had anything since morning," he said. "Eat something."

"Yes, your majesty."

He looked at her for just a moment longer than the instruction required.

Then someone stepped into his peripheral vision.

A broad alpha, older, silver-haired, from one of the northern packs. He had the bearing of a man who had led for decades and had decided that entitled him to say most things directly.

"A minute, Hunter," he said.

Josh turned. They stepped a few inches away from the group.

The alpha glanced at Olivia briefly. Then back at Josh.

"The girl who shifted," he said. "The white wolf. She is yours?"

"That is correct," Josh said.

"Then you knew," the alpha said. "Before today. You knew what she was."

Josh said nothing.

"And yet she is serving people," the alpha continued. "Carrying trays. Standing at walls. A white wolf, Hunter. Serving people." He let that sit for a moment. "And then you stand in a courtyard and tell Damian she is yours. You have some nerve."

The people nearby had gone very quiet.

Josh looked at the alpha for a long moment.

"It is none of your business," he said pleasantly.

He turned and walked away.

The alpha stood where he was.

The people nearby exchanged glances.

++++

Inside, Josh took a cup from a passing tray and stood near the northern pillar and thought.

The alpha was not wrong. That was the problem. He was not wrong and Josh had known it the moment the words landed. He had walked away because there was no answer he was ready to give yet.

A white wolf serving people who were meant to be served by others.

His white wolf.

He looked across the room to where Olivia stood with Harris and Cassandra, who was talking with her hands about something with great energy and absolutely no restraint.

Josh picked up his cup and looked away.

He had some thinking to do.

++++

Cassandra slipped outside ten minutes later.

She told Harris and Olivia she needed air and would be back. Which was true as far as it went.

Just at the doorway she met a woman's steady gaze.

The woman was standing near the top of the steps, middle-aged, pleasant-faced.

Cassandra went to her directly.

"You were looking at me inside," she said. "Why?"

The woman blinked. Then smiled.

"You walked in with her," the woman said. "The white wolf girl."

Cassandra kept her face neutral. "And?"

"You did not see what happened?" The woman seemed genuinely surprised. "Before the ceremony started. Out here on these very steps." She gestured around her. "That girl shifted. Right here. In front of everyone." She leaned in slightly. "Pure white wolf. I have not seen anything like it in my life. She fought Alpha Damian's sister in full wolf form and won. Kayla did not stand a chance."

Cassandra stood very still.

"White wolf," she repeated quietly.

Cassandra looked at the scuffed stone beneath her feet. The dark stain near the bottom step.

"Thank you," she said.

She turned and went back inside.

++++

She found Harris near the eastern wall where she had left him.

She stood beside him and looked across the room at Olivia, who was finally eating something small from a plate, apparently having been persuaded by Josh before he moved on to join the other alphas in a brief private gathering.

Harris glanced at Cassandra's face.

"You found out," he said.

"I found out," she confirmed.

They stood in silence for a moment. The music moved around them. Someone laughed loudly near the food table.

"Where will you go after this?" Harris asked. "When the event is done. Do you have somewhere in the region?"

Cassandra looked at him.

"To your house of course," she said.

Harris turned to look at her. His eyes had gone wide in a way that sat very unusually.

Cassandra held the straight face for exactly three seconds.

Then she smiled. "I am joking, my Lord."

Harris looked at her for a moment.

"Although," Cassandra said thoughtfully, still looking across the room, "it is a very long journey back to where I came from."

Harris said nothing.

But he did not walk away either.