Marked By Two Worlds

ought about everything that had happened in the last six hours. Rejected. Exiled. Barefoot in a strange city. Nearly hit by a car. Sitting in a penthouse reading a fort

o soft and the light was coming from the wrong direction. Then the previous night arrived in sequence and I lay still and let it settle over me and when it had settled I sat up. On the nightstand, things that hadn't been there when I fell asleep. A keycard. A small white envelope. A glass of water. I looked at the door. Still closed. I had not heard it open and I was a light sleeper - twenty two years of sharing a building with people who didn't always mean me well had made me a light sleeper - and I had not heard a single thing. I picked up the envelope. Inside, a note. Handwritten. The script was angular and precise and gave nothing away, which was exactly what I would have expected from him. The keycard opens the building, the elevator and this floor. Code for the elevator is 6214. Breakfast is on the kitchen counter. I will be in the office until seven this evening. You are not required to be anywhere today. D. I read it twice. Then I sat with it for a moment. The keycard he had promised. Ready before I was awake. Not waiting for me to ask. Not held back as a reminder that he was doing me a favour. Just there, on the nightstand, with a note explaining how it worked. Small thing. But I had lived a life where small things were often the truest indicators of how someone actually thought about you, and this small thing said something. I got up and went to the window. The city from sixty two floors up was different from the city on the street. From the street it had been enormous and anonymous and kind in its indifference. From here it was a pattern - a living map of streets and buildings and the distant glint of the river curving east. People moved through it far below, too small to have faces, going about lives that had nothing to do with pack bonds or ancient marks or contracts signed in the small hours of the morning. I pressed my palm flat against the glass. Down there I was nobody. No rank. No history. No version of myself that had been decided before I was old enough to decide anything. Nobody down there had been in that clearing last night. Nobody down there knew what a Blood Moon was or what a rejection sounded like when it happened in front of an audience or what the specific hollow feeling was of a bond snapping before it had existed for sixty seconds. Down there I could be anyone. I had never had that before. I stood at the window for a long time. The kitchen was easy to find. Breakfast was on the counter exactly as the note had said. Not a note telling me to make my own. Not ingredients left out in a pointed suggestion. Actual food, already prepared and covered, left at a temperature that said it had been made recently. Eggs, toast, fruit, a French press with coffee still warm in it. A small card beside everything that said simply: Eat. I sat down at the counter and I ate and I drank two cups of coffee and I thought. I needed clothes. Two changes of practical pack clothes were not going to work in whatever world Damien Crest moved in. I needed to be able to stand next to him in public and look like I belonged there, and I was not going to do that in a grey wool jumper. I needed to understand the mark. It had been dormant my entire life and had now been active for less than twelve hours and already it had done things I had no framework for. The warmth. The pulse. The way it had responded when Damien