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sweater and fashionably frayed designer jeans. “We’ll celebrate your first kill, Milady. It’s tradition, after all.”
    The sick feeling returned. “No. I mean, no thanks. It’s okay. Really.”
    And then I got out of there, feeling Christophe’s eyes on me all the way.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “The blood won’t come out of this.” Nathalie sighed, tilting her sleek dark head to the side. She held the silver dress up with delicate fingers, as if it was made of tissue paper. “We’ll have to go back to Nordy’s.”
    “Not again.” I groaned, dropping down in front of the vanity. A shower and half an hour of t’ai chi in the middle of the room had settled me down, kind of. I didn’t even mind Nat watching, since she very obviously didn’t look at me while I did the familiar movements. “I won’t do it, you can’t make me.”
    “You’d think I was taking you to an execution, not shopping. Jeez.” She grinned over my shoulder, the water-clear mirror holding our reflections. I was flushed and tangled, rangy like my dad, my blue Rolling Stones T-shirt torn but the hole-worn jeans I’d shimmied gratefully into mercifully hidden. Nathalie, on the other hand, looked like she belonged in a catalog. Curvy in all the right places, she wore a set of rosy-pink silk pajamas. You could tell she was werwulfen just by the way she moved and the supple grace of her shoulders as she flicked the dress again, laying it over a straight-backed wooden chair in front of the stripped-pine desk. “ Really , Dru.”
    “It’s the same thing,” I muttered.
    She could even make a shoulder holster look like a planned part of her pajama outfit. The coffee-colored leather number carrying a 9mm that she had on today moved as she rolled her shoulders back once, settling them. She ghosted over the pale wooden flooring and picked up a silver-backed hairbrush. This was the part of the night I alternately dreaded and looked forward to most.
    “I can take care of—” I began. But she took a handful of my hair and started brushing, just the last few inches and working up.
    “It’s traditional. Before Anna, each svetocha had an honor guard of wulfen girls, too. Good way for us to get out of the compound, get to see a lot of boys, and you know . . . it’s bound to be lonely, being svetocha . I’m glad we like each other.”
    Yeah, well, the last girl that was around emptied an assault rifle at me. You could just open me up like a soda can. “So Anna changed all that?”
    A shrug. “Slowly but surely, yeah. I think my aunt was around when it happened. She never talks about it.”
    I sighed. Thin blue lines of warding slid over the walls, complex patterned knots over the windows and the door. Refreshed every night, trembling under the screen of the visible, the wards were at least one familiar thing. I never went to bed without redoing the warding, no sir. Gran would be proud.
    The fingers in my hair were soothing, and Nathalie could be trusted.
    Christophe told me so. So did Shanks and Augustine. I suppose I could trust them, right? At least, Christophe hadn’t been wrong yet.
    I just . . . I wasn’t as trusting as I used to be. I guess. Getting betrayed over and over will do that to you. Still, I liked Nat. She had her head screwed on straight, and—this was the important thing—she understood that I was gonna go mad if I stayed cooped up all the time. So she was teaching me how to play another “traditional” game, slipping out during the day and exploring. We’d started with little runs through the Schola grounds and graduated to shopping and sightseeing. With a wulfen around in broad daylight, I was as safe as possible, right?
    And every single time she threw a handful of gravel at my window, inviting me to come out and play, it was easier to trust her a little more.
    The brush slipped through my hair. Nat could take the curling mass and make it look elegant, put together an outfit that looked actually fashionable in seconds,