Three weeks into her stay at the Hale castle, Eliza had learned the precise grammar of Derek's avoidance.

  He was not cruel about it. That would have been easier to navigate — cruelty had a structure she understood, a logic she could anticipate and work around. What Derek did instead was simply contract. He left rooms when she entered them, not immediately, not with the theatricality of someone making a statement, but with the efficiency of someone who had decided the room had become smaller than it needed to be. If she came down to the kitchen in the morning and he was already there, he finished what he was doing without haste and left. He had stopped pouring her coffee without being asked. The space where that had been — the unremarked ease of it, the particular quality of those early mornings before either of them had decided what the day required — had closed over cleanly, the way water closed over a dropped stone.

  She told herself it didn't matter. She was here to train, to unbind the ring, to build something against Lucien that was solid enough to hold when the time came. Derek Hale's opinion of her was not a necessary component of any of that.

  She told herself this with some frequency.

  Training with Sylvia had become the spine of her days — the thing she organized her hours around, the fixed point against which everything else was measured. She was improving. She could feel it in the way her gift responded now, with precision rather than pressure, finding the seam rather than flooding the room. Sylvia was not effusive about progress, which meant that when she said better it landed with the weight of something genuine.

  The ring remained bound.

  They had worked on it in every session, approaching it from different angles — the binding's architecture, the specific Fae-descended magic woven into its structure, the connection between the ring and the source of Eliza's gift that Lucien had made himself a part of. Each attempt clarified the problem without solving it. The ring had no gap. Lucien had not left one.

  "He wove himself into the root of it," Sylvia said, in the third week, with the tone of someone confirming what they had already suspected. "Not the ring itself. The gift. Getting the ring off without damaging the gift requires going somewhere he did not anticipate us going."

  "And where is that?"

  Sylvia had looked at her for a long moment. "We're finding out."

  There had been no more visions. The ring stayed cold and still through every attempt — unhelpful in both directions, offering nothing. Eliza checked it each morning when she woke, the way she had learned to check it, attending to its specific weight and temperature, and each morning it was simply a ring on her finger, dark and quiet and refusing to give anything away.

  She was growing restless.

  Sylvia had given her the afternoon. A deliberate gift, delivered without ceremony — rest, or don't, but don't train, the gift needs time between sessions the same as any muscle — and Eliza had said thank you and meant it and then stood in her room for twenty minutes trying to remember how to do nothing.

  She wandered.

  The castle had become familiar to her in the specific way that places became familiar when you lived in them against your intentions — not because you chose to learn them but because you had been there long enough that your body made the decisions before your mind caught up. She knew which floorboard on the second landing creaked. She knew the kitchen ran cold in the late afternoon. She knew the library had a particular quality of quiet on overcast days, something about the stone and the height of the ceiling and the specific light from the north-facing windows, that she had come to find more settling than she had expected.

  She was in the east corridor when the door stopped her.

  It was like the others in that wing — old dark oak, iron hardware, a latch worn to a dull shine by years of handling. Locked. She registered that before she moved toward it, without trying it. But what had stopped her had nothing to do with locks.

  Her gift opened on the door the way it opened on Derek — not by her choice, not by decision, simply responding to the density of what it felt. She stood in the low-lit corridor and breathed through the initial impact of it.

  Love and grief, wound together. Not layered — wound, the way the grain ran in old wood, inseparable, a single thing made of two. She had felt combinations like it before, in places where something true had happened. But this was not dormant. This was tended. Someone walked past this door and kept what was behind it alive by returning to it, by choosing, repeatedly, not to forget.

  She thought of Derek's face in the kitchen, in the early days before the Hale house. The weight she had registered the first time he entered Deaton's clinic — specific, structural, grief that had been carried long enough to become part of the shape of him. She thought of the specific quality behind the door and the specific quality she had read in Derek and recognized them as the same frequency.

  His recent wound, she thought. Whatever it is that still bleeds.

  She raised her hand toward the latch.

  Peter's voice arrived in her memory with the particular timing of something she had filed and was now retrieving against her will: there are restricted rooms in the castle. You’ll know them because they’ll be closed, and because something in you will want to open them. Don’t.

  She stood in the corridor with her hand not quite touching the latch.

  "I thought you were avoiding me."

  She turned. Peter was in the corridor behind her, some distance back, with his hands in his jacket pockets and the expression he wore when something was amusing him in a way he was choosing not to perform. He looked at her hand, still raised toward the latch, and then at her face, with the specific quality of attention he brought to things he found interesting.

  "I am avoiding you," Eliza said. She lowered her hand. "I'm doing it quite deliberately."

  Something moved in his expression — too quick to read, there and then filed. "I noticed."

  "I know you manipulated me," she said. "The library. The book on the wrong shelf. Taking me to the Hale house." She watched him. "I want to know why."

  Peter looked at her for a moment with the expression of a man deciding whether he is more interested in confirming or deflecting, and arriving at confirming because the alternative was less entertaining. "I showed you something you needed to know," he said. "I simply chose the method."

  "You chose a method that got me into trouble with Derek."

  "Yes," Peter said pleasantly. "I noticed that as well."

  She looked at him. He looked back, without the courtesy of filling the silence. He was very good at silences — had the particular gift of someone who understood that most people would rather speak into one than sit with it, and had learned to use that tendency with the patience of a man who had twice had enough time to learn patience.

  "Does it matter to you?" he asked. "That Derek is angry."

  She said nothing.

  He waited. He was very good at waiting.

  "I don't want conflict in the castle," she said, "if I have to stay here."

  Peter regarded her with the expression of someone who had heard what she said and had also heard the pause before it and had filed both separately.

  "Sit with that answer," he said, "for as long as it satisfies you." He moved to lean against the wall beside her, not beside the door but a few feet from it, close enough to see what she had been considering. "I'll tell you what you actually want to know. About why Derek is the way he is."

  Eliza crossed her arms. "You already told me about Kate Argent."

  "I did,” he said. "I told you what Kate did. But I did not tell you about Jennifer Blake."

  The name landed without recognition. "Who is Jennifer Blake?"

  Peter considered the phrasing for a moment. "A woman who came to Beacon Hills with very serious problems and considerably more power than anyone in this pack was prepared for," he said. "A Darach. A dark druid. She had survived an attempt on her life by Deucalion's alpha pack — a group of alphas who murdered their own betas to absorb their power, an arrangement I personally find distasteful even from a structural standpoint." He paused. "She survived. Barely. She came here to rebuild herself and to take her revenge, and to do that she performed ritual sacrifices — philosophers, warriors, healers, virgins, guardians — to charge the Nemeton. To turn it into a weapon."

  Eliza listened. She thought of the tree stump in the forest — the Nemeton — and the energy it carried, the things it had witnessed and absorbed without judgment.

  "She also," Peter continued, with the same measured evenness, "seduced my nephew in the interim. She presented herself as a woman who needed protecting, which Derek has never been able to walk past. She manufactured intimacy as a strategy." He looked at the door. "When the full shape of what she was doing became clear — and it became clear in the most violent possible way — she threatened Cora's life. Derek's sister. She held the pack hostage to her own survival and Derek paid the price to keep her alive, because the alternative was losing people he couldn't lose again." He was quiet for a moment. "Isaac Lahey left Derek's pack after that. Transferred his allegiance to Scott. Derek lost his last beta because of what Jennifer Blake had done and what he had done in response to it."

  The corridor was very quiet.

  Eliza thought about the dream. About standing in the driveway of the Hale house with a match in her hand and the particular way her power had felt when she used the Hale house grief — responsive, effortless, making something bright from something ruined.

  "I'm not Jennifer Blake," she said.

  Peter looked at her.

  "The rituals I was part of at the Chateau —" she kept her voice flat and precise, the way she said difficult things — "they sickened me. Every one of them. I was complicit in things I couldn't prevent and I know the difference between that and choosing it." She met his eyes. "My gift sickens me. The things I can do with it. The fact that it responds to suffering like a—" she stopped. "I am not a person who wants to use darkness. That is not a performance."

  Peter looked at her for a long moment.

  "I know that," he said. Simply. Without ornamentation.

  It was the most direct thing he had said to her since she arrived, and it landed with the unexpected weight of something she hadn't known she needed to hear until it was given.

  "But Derek doesn't," she said.

  "Derek doesn't trust quickly." He pushed off from the wall. "He comes by that honestly. Give it time." He said it in the tone of someone who has identified the solution and found it straightforward even if the work of it wasn't. He began moving down the corridor. "You'll have an opportunity shortly, in any case."

  She watched him go. "What does that mean?"

  He stopped without turning. She recognized the quality of the pause — theatrical, but also genuinely pleased with itself, the pause of a man who has been waiting to deliver something and is allowing himself a moment of enjoyment before he does.

  "Thanksgiving," he said. "Full pack meeting. Scott's insisted on it." He resumed walking. "Stiles is even flying in from D.C.."

  He rounded the corner.

  She stood in the corridor and listened to his footsteps recede, and then to the particular quiet that followed them.

  She turned back to the door.

  The love and grief were still there — entwined, dense, tended. Derek's wound. Whatever it was that he kept behind a locked door in the oldest part of the castle and returned to often enough that the air outside it held the frequency of him. She felt her gift opening toward it with the specific pull of something it had been waiting to receive, and she closed it, deliberately, the way Sylvia had taught her to close what she'd opened.

  She lowered her hand.

  She walked back down the corridor.