Page 71 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

And he was right.

There’s power in silence, in letting people work to figure you out while not knowing the first thing about you. In deciding who to let in and who to shut out.

Anger shuts out everyone. It chases away the people who might have stayed.

“And how has that worked out for you?” the Wolf King asks between bites.

“Given I’m not howling my frustrations into the sky when things piss me off, I imagine my blood pressure is quite low.”

He lifts his fork to his mouth, though not before I glimpse one corner of his lips twitch in something so subtle it could almost be a smile. “Howling is quite liberating. You should try it sometime.”

He looks at me as he chews, head slightly tilted, eyeing me as if I’m not a bug under a microscope the way he viewed me before.

No, that’s not right, Kat. He looked at you with so much disgust it’s like you were a dead thing he stepped in.

I’m not sure what changed but there’s a level of interest in his gaze that wasn’t there before and I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

“Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” His soft admission surprises me almost as much as it must surprise him, because he freezes for a split second.

I’m not the least bit surprised when his expression hardens. Suddenly he’s back to being the same coldly furious Wolf King he is when he isn’t growling or snarling at me.

“You’re a feral, and we don’t let ferals live.”

“No,youhavedecidedI am a feral and are too stubborn to admit you’re wrong. And youarewrong. Even a seven-year-oldboy who snuck into my room knew I was no threat. What’s your excuse?”

He eats another bite and slowly chews before swallowing. This is a punishment. Or it’s torture. A little of both from the sounds my stomach is making.

Behind him, the door swings open, and my gaze clashes with Finan, who seems surprised to find the Wolf King eating his lunch here. He steps into the room and stands off to the side.

“There is no record of you from before college,” the Wolf King says.

I make my face a blank slate.

I should have known he would dig more into my past and learn something I have spent the last four years fighting to keep hidden.

Namely, that I don’t have a past.

Once I became Kat Meadows, I let my old self go and I’ve worked so fuckinghardto forget her. Only in my dreams and nightmares does the terrified little girl I used to be still exist, and no amount of scrubbing can dislodge her from my memories.

I hate her because she was so weak, and I refuse to be weak anymore.

I won’t.

His gaze is watchful, but since I know to always keep my guard up around him, I merely cock my head. “Was that a question or an observation?”

“For someone threatened with death, you show no sense of self preservation. Tell me what I want to know, and maybe I’ll let you go.”

He seems like the type who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than everything.

I’d be cracking open so many secrets and so many vulnerabilities for him to mock, laugh at, and use against me.

Some things are worth dying for. My secrets are one of them. They’ve been used against me before. I don’t intend to let it happen again.

“No.”

“Then I will kill you,” he threatens.

---