The pool smell was the same everywhere — chlorine and humidity and the particular stillness of enclosed water — and Scarlett had never found it especially pleasant, but she had stationed herself on the bleachers with the resigned efficiency of someone who had accepted an inconvenient post and intended to make the best of it.
Below, Jackson Whittemore was doing the thing he did best, which was existing loudly and expecting people to be grateful for it. He was in the water with Allison. They kept swimming together, and he seemed to find reasons to laugh at things that weren't particularly funny with the particular energy of someone who had decided that charm was a volume setting.
Beside her, Scott was sitting with Allison's bag open across his knees, moving through it with the focused misery of someone defusing a bomb they hadn't asked to defuse. He had been at it for ten minutes. His jaw was set. His shoulders were tight. And every time Allison laughed at something Jackson said, the line of his mouth got slightly thinner.
"Come on, Scott," Scarlett said, glancing at him. "I don't think the jackass is a real threat."
"I don't understand why he wants her to come to the game tonight," Scott said with a frown, not looking up, fingers moving to another pocket.
"So, what?" Scarlett shrugged her shoulders. "Is he going to impress her with his lacrosse skills?" She watched Jackson attempt something in the water that she suspected was meant to look athletic. "This just confirms me that Jackson Whittemore knows nothing about girls."
"No boy knows anything about girls," Scott muttered, with the tone of someone who had recently and painfully confirmed this about himself.
"Yeah," Scarlett said, nodding once, "but some are better than others. And Allison noticed you first, did she not?"
"Yeah, but that doesn't mean she can't notice others." He made a short gesture toward the pool, where Allison had just laughed at something and water was going everywhere.
Scarlett watched them for a moment. The easy proximity, the careless laughter as they splashed each other.
"Alright," she admitted, "that I would not like."
Scott snorted — a short, knowing sound — and she could tell from the angle of it exactly who he thought she was talking about, which was irritating because he was completely right.
She rolled her eyes. "I'm a creature led by impulse. Jealousy is one of them." She kept her voice even, matter-of-fact. "It doesn't mean you have to do the same.
It was true. Vampires were not subtle creatures underneath all the composure — they felt things with an intensity that human nervous systems simply weren't built for, and the thought of watching Stiles and someone else do what Jackson and Allison were doing right now produced something in her chest that she was not going to look at too closely. His laugh in someone else's direction. Someone else making his ears go red.
She pushed the thought away with some firmness.
"Doesn't he have a girlfriend, by the way?" Scott said, opening another pocket.
"Technically." Scarlett remembered the night they'd been trapped at school — Jackson gravitating toward Allison with the particular certainty of someone who had never considered the possibility of not being wanted. It had been strange even then.
Not that it mattered. She was fairly sure Allison Argent was not going to spend her evening looking at anyone who wasn't the anxious pup currently rifling through her bag.
Scarlett let her gaze drift around the pool room, and that was when she saw Lydia.
She was just outside the door — visible through the narrow window panel, talking to another girl with the brisk efficiency of someone wrapping up a conversation they had been managing for longer than they wanted to. Scarlett watched her for a second and remembered something she'd been meaning to ask.
Lydia was, objectively, the most qualified person she knew for this particular question. Which was either a good sign or a sign of Scarlett getting crazy.
"Scott," she said, already standing. "How much time before they leave the pool?"
Scott looked up briefly, checked the pool, checked his phone. "Ten minutes, maybe. Why?"
"I'll be right back."
She left him with the bag and pushed through the door just as Lydia was finishing her conversation, the other girl already turning to leave.
"Lydia."
Lydia turned. "Hey, Scarlett."
"Can I ask you something?"
Lydia waited, patient in the way she was when she already suspected she was going to enjoy the question.
Scarlett felt, briefly, ridiculous. She had hunted. She had fought hunters. Survived a fire. She had killed. And here she was, about to ask a seventeen-year-old about dress shops and feeling anxiuous about it.
"Where can I buy a pretty dress for the Formal?"
Lydia's lips curved into something that was almost a smirk and almost genuine delight. "You want to make a good impression on your new boyfriend?"
Scarlett did not confirm this. Confirming it would require acknowledging that she had spent more time than was strictly appropriate imagining the specific expression Stiles would make when he saw her — that open, helpless brightness he could never quite contain — and that the thought of engineering that expression deliberately was something she found profoundly satisfying. So satisfying that she had to do all she could to keep her fangs inside even now.
"Lydia. The shop."
Lydia giggled. "The best one if you want to be pretty is Celeste's on Madison — but," her gaze shifted, carrying an implication as clearly as a billboard, "if you want to go all the way, there's Maison Laurent on Fifth."
Scarlett's lips broke into a smirk before she registered that she was doing it.
"I don't have to tell you anything," she said.
"You absolutely do," Lydia replied, with the certainty of someone who had already decided this was happening. "Because we are going shopping together — all three of us — and I need to know your intentions." Her eyes were bright and entirely too perceptive. "Formal nights have a certain... momentum to them. And the right dress is a decision, not just an outfit."
Scarlett took a slow breath.
She had thought about it before. She would not pretend she hadn't — in the quiet of the Jeep with his hand over hers, or at his door when he'd looked at her like she was the most confusing and necessary thing he'd ever seen. She had thought of them dancing slow. Then the ride home after. And she had thought about what could come after that. What she wanted to happen after. She could see it happen. Quite clearly. And again her fangs begged to come out at the thought.
Lydia giggled again, reading whatever had crossed Scarlett's face with the accuracy of someone who had been collecting this kind of data for years. "We'll find you the perfect dress."
Scarlett let out a scoff that came out more amused than dismissive. "Alright," she said, and turned back toward the door.
Behind her, she heard the soft chime of Lydia's phone receiving a message.
She was already reaching for the handle when she heard the silence, and she turned.
Lydia was standing with her phone in both hands, reading the screen with a small, fixed frown. Then reading it again. Her thumb was very still.
"Hey." Scarlett paused in the doorway. "You alright?"
Why am I even asking? Scarlett could not help but wonder.
Lydia looked up. The smile she produced was quick and entirely constructed. "Sure," she said. "I'll call you."
"Sure," Scarlett echoed, a frown on her face as she watched Lydia walk away, phone still in hand, moving down the corridor with a pace that was almost her usual one but not quite.
Lydia Martin, Scarlett thought, watching her go, is a genuinely strange girl.
She pushed back through the pool door.
Scott was three steps away from running into her, bag abandoned on the bleachers, moving with the urgent focus of someone who had just thought of something.
"Hey — where are you going?" she asked, stepping aside.
"I thought of another place," Scott said, already half-past her. "Jackson went to change, I'll catch you later."
He was gone before she could answer, shoes squeaking against the wet floor, disappearing through the far exit.
Scarlett stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the abandoned bag on the bleachers, at the still surface of the pool now emptied of its occupants, at the long room settling back into quiet. The chlorine smell sat in the air undisturbed.
Scarlett sat back down, crossing her legs, and let the silence settle around her.
The necklace hadn't been here today. That was what she had understood that morning talking to Allison. So she had relaxed about them finding it for that day.
She would be lying if she didn't feel her chest tightening at what she was doing. But it was the only thing she could do. She could not let them understand the links between the Alpha and the Argents. She could not let Stiles know...
But that was a problem for another time. Now she had to keep Jackson under control. And that had been the most annoying and boring thing that had ever happened for her to do.
He talked with his friends, he spoke to Lydia at some point, he walked around like he owned the place. And then finally he decided to settle in the lacrosse changing room, where the boys could lift some weights before the game.
And he had been at it for fourty-five minutes, which was fourty-four minutes longer than she had found it interesting.
Scarlett had entered at some point, to go sit in the coach's studio like she did in days like those. Watching boredly as few other players entering to warm up.
The particular smell of rubber and metal and effort that she had never found especially compelling. She was sitting on a bench near the door with her jacket across her knees, and Jackson had been aware of her since she'd walked in, in the way that people who needed to be looked at were always aware of being looked at.
"Sorry," a voice made her look at the boy at the door. He was very tall, with light hair and blue eyes. "Can I ask for some ice?" He asked.
Scarlett observed the dark mark under his left eyes. But she got up to go take the pack of ice. She glanced back at him as she opened the red box where they kept it.
"Was it a ball?" Scarlett asked.
"What?" he said almost surprised by her question. Scarlett's eyes went to study him.
"That dark mark the size of a fist," she said, using her strenght to activate the instant ice.
"Oh... yeah..." the boy said, not quite looking her in the eyes. Scarlett found herself glancing at the bruise, not able to look away. She felt like she knew that kind of bruise.
"Here," she said handing him the pack of ice. He seemed nervous, but he finally took it.
"Thanks," he muttered.
Scarlett nodded silently for a moment. "What is your name again?" He looked at her with wide eyes.
"Isaac," he said, before clearing his throat. "I'm Isaac Lahey." Scarlett forced a little smile, before observing him as he went to his locker.
That was not a ball, she thought, her arms crossed as she was standing on the door.
"Already tired of that joke of a boyfriend you have?" Jackson's voice made her turn with a glare, that only got sharper when she saw him smirking.
"I think I should be asking you this," Scarlett answered, but Jackson laughed.
"And I'd say yes," Jackson said, taking a deep, satisfied breath. "I didn't need a joke of a girlfriend, now." Scarlett's brows turned up in a frown. Did he broken up with Lydia?
A chuckle left her lips, "You kidding?" she said, "Are you seriously going after Allison?"
"I want what that cheater of McCall has," Jackson said too proudly. Too stupidly. Scarlett tilted her head, keeping her arms crossed over her chest as she took some steps towards Jackson, so that he could hear when she whispered.
"You truly are an idiot," she said before huffing a chuckle. "I really wish too see you dealing with all of this, it would be a sight really."
He looked at her for a moment with that assessing quality he had, the one that he got when he was too slow to take a guess. "You are one too."
Scarlett this time let out a clear laugh, "Oh, please." She said. "I'm not a werewolf."
"Then what?"
She was finding Jackson Whittemore's stupidity incredibly entertaining. It was a shame that she grew bored really easily.
"Something that you should not play with," she answered, tilting her head. "As you shouldn't with the puppies, before you'll hurt yourself."
Then one of the boys opened the door of the changing room, an incredulous look on his face. "I've just seen the police bring here Harris."
Scarlett's eyes grew larger. They had brought him there?
Harris was there at school?
Could she do something? But what could she do? What should she do?
Kill him?
No... she didn't even know what he had done. She only knew that Laura had been looking for him. Scarlett wondered if she had found him. And what she had asked him.
What did you find, Laura?
She had faced the man so many times without knowing any of it. She could have killed Harris so easily if she had known. She could still do it, if only she knew enough.
Her chest tightened again at the thought.
Why are you hesitating? She asked herself, her leg bouncing up and down as she closed her eyes. She had grown to have no second thoughts when she killed. But now... why was it getting so difficult?
She didn't recognize herself.
And before she even noticed, Scarlett had been moving through the corridor on autopilot, the pool room behind her, and somewhere between one thought and the next her feet had taken her to the east wing bathroom without her deciding to go there.
The water came out cold and she let it run over her wrists, staring at the drain, not at her reflection.
Why do you keep hesitating?
Six years ago she would not have had to ask. Six years ago the answer to Harris knows something would have been immediate and uncomplicated — find him, take what she needed, leave. Clean. Simple. The version of herself that had arrived in Beacon Hills would have done it before lunch.
He deserves it, she thought, taking a breath. They all deserve it.
She turned the tap off and gripped the edge of the sink.
Then the door opened behind her.
She saw Kate in the mirror before she'd fully turned. Blonde hair, leather jacket, that particular quality of stillness that predators had when they weren't bothering to pretend otherwise. The door swung shut behind her. In her right hand, held loosely, almost casually, was a wooden stake — the point worn smooth with use, the grip dark with age. In her left, something silver caught the light.
Scarlett turned around.
"You know," Kate said, her voice slightly warmer than it should be for what was underneath it, "I've been trying to figure you out." She tilted her head, eyes moving over Scarlett. "I never understood what they were thinking. The Hales." A small shrug. "Keeping something like you around."
Scarlett said nothing. But the anger in her built up quickly as she heard Kate use her family's name.
"A vampire." Kate said the word like she was turning a stone over. "Living in a pack house with a family of werewolves. Playing at being tamed." Her lips curved. "Did they really think that was going to work? Did you?"
"It worked fine," Scarlett said, "until you burned them alive."
Kate's expression didn't change. "Fire," she said pleasantly. "That's one of yours, isn't it? One of the ways." She turned the stake slowly in her fingers, and Scarlett's eyes followed her movements. "Fire. Wood through the heart." The silver thing in her left hand shifted, and Scarlett saw now what it was — a thin silver garrote wire, coiled once around Kate's fingers, the metal catching fluorescent light in a way that made her skin want to pull back from itself. "Decapitation. And silver, of course." Kate watched her.
Scarlett kept her eyes on the wire.
Silver burned. Not like fire — it was quieter than that and worse, a deep cellular wrongness, like the metal rejected the thing she was made of at a level beneath pain. She had touched it once by accident in the first year, a silver candlestick in a house she'd been clearing, and the memory of it still lived in her palm.
"What do you want?" Scarlett asked.
"My questions are always the same. The Alpha... and Derek." A step closer — unhurried, like she had all the time available to her. "Where is he, little corpse?"
"I don't know where Derek is," Scarlett said.
"Hm." Kate considered this with the expression of someone who had heard many lies and found them all roughly equivalent. "We've seen you together." She tilted her head. "He trusts you. That's interesting, for Derek. He doesn't trust easily."
"And you know that well, don't you?" Scarlett hissed, her eyes glancing at the stake in Kate's hand. But then she looked up when she heard Kate laugh.
"Are you really angry about that?" Kate asked, as if Scarlett had said something unbelievable. "You're a creature that is supposed to be alone. Why do you care about a few burnt werewolves?" Scarlett's jaw clenched, her breath getting laboured in anger.
"Why do you care about werewolves?" Kate asked again, tilting her head. "Why are you dating one?"
The question landed wrong — at an angle she hadn't expected — and for a half second she genuinely didn't understand it. Dating one. A werewolf. Her mind went to Peter first, automatic and immediate. Did Kate know about her relationship with Peter? But that didn't make sense, because if she knew about Peter, Kate should have figured out that he was the Alpha. But she didn't know who it was...
Derek.
The thought arrived a beat later and she almost laughed, which was the wrong reaction and she knew it, but the absurdity of it — Derek, of all people.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Scarlett asked, unable to hide a frown.
Kate smiled. "Is that how you want to play?"
Something in the smile was different from before. Less sharp, more patient. The smile of someone who already had the answer and was enjoying watching someone else reach for the wrong one.
Was she talking about Scott? But Kate knew Allison had been dating the pup...
Kate tilted her head, patient, like she had all the time in the world. "The boy. The one who drives you places. Picks you up. Holds your hand." Scarlett felt her body tense, while Kate's eyes were steady and entirely certain. "So I started asking myself — why would a vampire obsessed with werewolves keep a human that close if he's not the other Beta?"
Stiles.
Something rose in Scarlett's throat.
And she moved before she could stop herself, fangs sliding down.
Capito. Combattimento equilibrato, Scarlett va bene finché Kate non tira fuori l'argento. Poi arriva Allison. Riscrivo.
She crossed the distance in under a second and hit Kate with everything she had — shoulder into sternum, driving her hard into the tile wall. The crack of impact was loud in the narrow room. Kate's head snapped back. The stake clattered from her hand and skidded across the floor.
Scarlett didn't give her time to recover.
She grabbed Kate by the jacket and drove her into the wall a second time, harder, and heard the sound of something in Kate's shoulder giving — not breaking, but close. Kate exhaled sharply, real pain, the kind that couldn't be trained away entirely. Scarlett had her pinned with one forearm across her chest, her free hand at Kate's throat.
"You shouldn't have come alone, bitch," Scarlett said, very quietly.
Kate laughed, before moving.
She twisted with the violence of years of training, got her knee up into Scarlett's ribs — white-flash pain, enough to loosen the grip — and used the half-second it bought to slam her elbow into Scarlett's jaw. Scarlett's head snapped sideways. She tasted blood.
She came back faster.
She caught Kate's arm before it completed its arc, twisted, drove her palm into Kate's sternum with enough force to put her back against the wall again. But then the wire touched Scarlett before she saw it — a thin metallic whisper — and then the silver garrote made contact with the back of her hand and the burning started immediately, deep and cellular and wrong, spreading from the contact point upward, her grip failing despite herself.
She wrenched backward. Her back leaned against the sink as her hand was shaking.
Kate was upright again. Slower than before, holding the stake back in her hand. The silver wire coiled around the fingers of the other. Watching Scarlett with the focused calm of someone who had just found the right key for the right lock.
"You should have burn in that house," Kate said, slightly breathless.
One step, fast and deliberate, and before Scarlett could get her compromised arm up Kate's hand shot out and pressed the silver wire directly against the junction of her neck and shoulder, flat against the skin.
The sound that came out of Scarlett was not something she chose to make.
It was immediate and total and animal — a low broken noise that she hadn't made in years, hadn't made since she was new to what she was and still learning the specific cruelty of silver against vampire flesh. Her knees hit the floor before she'd decided to go down. Her vision went white at the edges and then gray and her whole left side was screaming and the wire was still there, still pressed, Kate's hand steady and clinical above her.
Then Scarlett noticed Kate getting ready to hit her with the wooden stick.
She got her right leg up and drove her heel into Kate's knee with everything she had left.
Kate's leg buckled. The wire lost contact.
The relief was so immediate it was almost worse than the pain — a sudden violent absence, her body lurching back into itself all at once. Scarlett braced one hand on the floor, then the sink, and pulled herself upright. Her left side was still screaming. The mark at her neck and shoulder was already doing something she couldn't look at. Her arm was shaking badly.
Kate had caught herself against the wall. She was upright. Still had the stake in her right hand.
Then suddenly the door opened, and both of them turned.
Allison Argent stood in the doorway, Her eyes moved between them — Scarlett at the sink, one hand braced against the porcelain, trying very hard to make her posture look like nothing. Kate across the room, relaxed and upright.
"Kate." Allison's voice had a careful note in it. "What are you doing here?"
Kate's expression shifted in the space of a breath — the stake disappeared somewhere in her jacket so smoothly it might never have existed, her shoulders dropped half an inch, and by the time Allison had finished the sentence she was already turning toward her niece with a smile that reached her eyes in all the right ways.
She's a better liar than me, Scarlett thought.
"What am I doing?" Her voice was warm, easy. "Am I not allowed to use the bathroom?" Kate said, with the light reasonableness of someone who found the question mildly amusing.
Then she turned back toward Scarlett — just briefly, just long enough — and the warmth in her expression didn't change but something underneath it did, something that existed only in the layer Allison couldn't read from where she was standing.
"And I've met your friend," Kate said pleasantly. "Scarlett, right?"
Scarlett looked at her across the narrow room. Her arm was still burning. She had managed to retract her fangs through sheer focused will, jaw tight, lips pressed together just enough.
"Right," she said.
Her voice came out level. She was proud of that.
Allison smiled, glancing between them with the uncomplicated warmth of someone who saw two people she liked in the same room and found that straightforwardly good. "She's great."
"She is," Kate agreed. She began moving toward Allison, unhurried, tucking her hair back with one hand. "You should invite her to dinner sometime. It would be fun."
The word fun landed the way Kate intended it to land.
Scarlett held her gaze until Kate looked away first.
"Are you okay?" Allison asked, her attention shifting to Scarlett with that genuine concern. "You look —"
"I'm fine," Scarlett said. She straightened slightly, letting go of the sink. "I've got to deal with Coach in a few, so—"
Allison's expression shifted into immediate sympathy. "Oh god, yeah. Good luck." She nodded with the solemn understanding, knowing perfectly well how annoying was to be around Finstock.
"Alright, sweetheart." Kate touched Allison's shoulder, light, steering. "Let's go take a good sit for the match."
Allison shouldered her bag. "See you later, Scarlett."
"Yeah, later," Scarlett said.
Kate paused in the doorway. Just for a second, just long enough. Her eyes found Scarlett's over Allison's shoulder and held them.
Then she was gone.
The door swung shut behind them. Their footsteps moved away down the corridor — Allison's voice drifting back, something about the drive home — and then the building's ordinary noise swallowed them completely.
Scarlett stood alone in the narrow bathroom.
She waited four full seconds.
Then she reached into the collar of her shirt to see what the silver had done to her skin.
Her neck felt raw. Her arm was still burning from the wrist to the shoulder, the blistered mark across her knuckles already weeping slightly, and the longer contact at her wrist had left something deeper — a radiating ache that would take hours to fade, maybe longer.
You should invite her to dinner. It would be fun.
Kate suspected Stiles was a beta. Had been watching him for days. Were they already moving? Did they wanted to kill him?
Scarlett could move fast. She knew where Kate was staying. But fast wasn't the same as certain, and certain was the only margin that mattered when the variable was Stiles being hunted down. But she knew that if Kate remained inside the Argent house, Scarlett could not reach her without an invitation. And Kate was aware of that.
She needed to get inside that house. She needed to end this fast.
And she needed Peter for that.
She hated it. She stood in the east wing bathroom of Beacon Hills High with silver burns on her hand and her neck and hated it with a clean, uncomplicated specificity — hated that he had been right, hated that it had come back to this, hated most of all that she already knew she was going to do it before she'd finished the thought.
You'll come back to me. His voice in her kitchen, smooth and certain.
Walked out through the corridor and through the side exit and across the parking lot without stopping, the afternoon light sharp and indifferent above the treeline.
Her motorcycle was where she'd left it.
She pulled on her helmet, started the engine, and pulled out of the lot heading north.
Peter would be in the long-term ward, in the room with the window that faced east, in the bed he'd occupied for six years while the world continued without him — and she was going to walk in there and ask him for help and he was going to know exactly what it had cost her to come. She pushed the throttle and let the road open ahead of her.
The hospital at night had a different quality than during the day — quieter in the corridors, the lighting lower, the particular smell of antiseptic and recycled air more concentrated without the daytime traffic to dilute it. Scarlett took the stairs two at a time, her burns still radiating, her neck still raw where the wire had sat against her skin for too long.
She didn't slow down until she reached the fourth floor.
The long-term ward was always dim at this hour, the overhead lights replaced by the softer glow of wall panels, the nurses' station half-staffed, the corridor lined with closed doors and the particular silence of people who had been here long.
She knew the room without counting doors.
She pushed it open and a frown appeared on her face.
Peter was already standing in the middle of the room with his black leather jacket on and underneath it a red shirt, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched the dark sky outside. But he sensed her immediately — she had barely made a step into the room before he was already turning, a smirk settling on his lips.
"I wondered how long it would take," he said.
Scarlett clanched her jaw, "Don't," Scarlett said.
"I'm not doing anything." His voice was mild, almost warm, the voice he used when he was most dangerous. "I'm standing in my room. You came to me."
She didn't answer.
Peter's eyes moved to her neck. To the blistered mark across her knuckles, the rawness at her wrist, the way she was holding her arm slightly away from her body without entirely meaning to. Something crossed his expression.
"Silver," he said.
"Kate."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he moved toward her, but she stepped back before he could touch her arm. "Oh come on, Scarlett," he said, rolling his eyes, and moved past her into the corridor. Scarlett bit her lip for a moment before following him. It was always empty at that hour.
She had come here for a reason and standing still wasn't going to get her to it.
"She was in the school," Scarlett said, keeping her voice low. "With a stake and a garrote wire. She's looking for Derek and she's..." Scarlett stopped for a moment, not sure she wanted Peter to know why she was that scared. "She's looking for the other Beta."
Peter walked beside her without hurrying. "Does she?"
"We need to end this, Peter," Scarlett said, taking his arm to make him stop. "Like we had planned. As we should have done from the beginning. We hunt her down and we kill her."
Peter was quiet for a moment. The parking lot below was mostly empty — a few cars, the orange wash of the lot lights against the asphalt, the tree line dark and still beyond.
"There she is," he said softly.
Scarlett frowned. "What?"
"My moonlight." Something in his posture settled. He looked at her with that familiar expression, the one that had always made her feel like the most important person in the room. Scarlett closed her eyes for a brief moment at the name. "I know what you need." He said it warmly, like an old fact. "I always know. That's why we work, you and I." He leaned slightly against the wall, easy, unhurried. "And I'm more than willing to do anything you ask."
Scarlett looked up at him and he smiled at her. She could see the pride in his gaze.
"Like I did when you came to me the first time," he said, and his voice had that quality — warm, unhurried, the voice of someone sharing a memory he was fond of. "When you asked me to attack that boy so that you could feed him your blood."
The images came before she could stop them.
The sounds came back first. Always the sounds. The impact of it, the short cut-off noise Stiles had made when he'd hit the ground, the wet specific sounds of something that wasn't supposed to happen to a human body. Peter had been thorough, because Peter was always thorough. The cuts across his side, deep enough to bleed the way she needed them to bleed. His face against the asphalt. The stillness of him, that terrible stillness, that had lasted three seconds too long before he'd moved again.
And then she had come forward, like she had planned...
She pressed her jaw tight until it hurt. Looked at a point past Peter's shoulder.
"It was inspired, really," Peter continued, and his voice was warm with something that was almost admiration. "Scott's best friend. The one person always at his side," he tilted his head. "You chose well."
In Scarlett's mind flashed Stiles grateful expression when she had give him her blood. How he thanked her... how he had trusted her from that point...
Her chest tightened at the thought and her fists clenched. She didn't want to talk about it. She didn't what to think about it.
"That's what I've always loved about you, moonlight," Peter said again, "You never confuse sentiment with strategy."
Scarlett looked up at him, feeling her eyes sting with tears.
"Oh my God."
The voice came from behind her.
Every single part of Scarlett's body stopped at once.
She knew that voice. She knew it in the dark and half asleep and across crowded rooms. She had memorized it without meaning to and had now became the sound that she seeked the most.
Peter's expression didn't change. Not a flicker. Just that same settled satisfaction, quiet and complete.
Then Scarlett turned.
He was standing at the end of the corridor, one hand holding his phone against his ear — but he was not listening to whoever was on the other end.
He was looking at her.
She had seen him scared before. She had seen him anxious and exhausted and running on no sleep and barely holding things together. She had seen him angry. She had seen him look at her with that open, unguarded thing he couldn't quite control.
She had never seen him look like this.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing something she didn't have a word for. But she felt her chest tightening painfully.
"Stiles," she said.
His name came out of her like something breaking.