The drive back from the clinic was quiet.
Peter drove the way he always did — unhurried, one hand on the wheel, the specific ease of someone who found driving beneath his attention and was therefore very good at it. Scarlett sat in the passenger seat with her eyes on the road and her hands in her lap and did not look at him.
Why did that man have a barrier of mountain ash? Who was he? Clearly not just a vet.
"Deaton won't be able to keep him indefinitely," Peter said.
"Not after you threatened Allison," Scarlett said, her head leaned against her cold knuckles. Peter chuckled.
"I've learnt from the best." She turned to him with a glare.
"You mean yourself?" she asked. "Because you've taught me how to do it."
"Give yourself a little credit, my sweet," Peter said, glancing briefly in her direction. "I've just pushed you. You caught up pretty fast."
She looked back at the road.
She had. That was the thing she couldn't argue with and didn't try to. She had caught up fast and she had been good at it and for six years she had not found that fact uncomfortable. She was finding it uncomfortable now, which was its own kind of problem.
"If you hurt her, Scott won't ever help us," she said letting out a breath.
"Scott will come when he understands what's at stake." Peter's voice carried the mild certainty of someone who had already worked through the variables and found them manageable. "He needs to be brought to the right conclusion. That takes pressure."
"Or the truth," she said. "Tell him about the fire. Tell him what Kate did, who she burned, why we're doing this. He might listen, if you told him the truth instead of threatening the people he loves—"
"Since when you're so sweet, Scarlett?"
She looked at him.
He was watching the road, his expression carrying that particular quality it got when he was finding something mildly amusing at her expense.
She closed her eyes, "I've spent much time with him, have I not?" she argued nervously. "He doesn't like it when people threatenes Allison. He would do anything for her..." Her mind drift away a moment, a flash of honey brown eyes invaded her mind and she had to do all she could to push that image away.
"Exactly," Peter said and Scarlett took a breath shaking her head as she turned away. "We also need to find Derek."
"I told you," she said, "I'll find him."
"I need him now."
"Yeah, yeah, I know that."
A beat of silence. Peter drove. She watched the town move past the windows and tried to think about Derek — the hunters, the Hale house, the places she knew he went when he wanted to disappear — and not about other things.
She was not entirely successful. Her mind would always bring her back at the night before.
I was happy.
Stiles' words echoed in her ears, and they hurt as if someone had been pushing a silver chain against her skin.
So was I, she thought feeling her eyes sting.
"What is it?" Peter's voice made her straightened her back.
"We need to get rid of this car," she said.
Peter glanced at her. "Why?"
"Because it's starting to stink."
Faint. Still faint enough that a human wouldn't catch it yet — just an undertone beneath the car's interior, beneath the cold air from the vents. But she knew the smell.
She looked at the road and breathed through her mouth and thought about Jennifer. The unnerving voice, the wrong smile, standing in the hospital corridor behind Stiles so he couldn't run. She hadn't asked Peter for details. She had seen the trunk when they'd left and had not asked and had spent the drive to the clinic not thinking about it.
"I could have charmed her," she said. "Made her leave the country."
"You could have," Peter agreed pleasantly. "But you were too busy crying, my love."
The anger arrived clean and hot — the only thing that had felt clean in two days.
"Fuck you, Peter."
He smiled. She could see it from the corner of her eye — small, completely unbothered, the smile of someone who had expected exactly this response and found it mildly satisfying.
She looked back at the road.
The town moved past the windows, ordinary and indifferent, and she breathed through her mouth and said nothing else, as they drove.
She wished she could forget what had happened the night before. What she was about to do... Fuck, she couldn't even think about it. And she couldn't think about him, but she kept doing it anyway. How he looked at her, what he said, how he'd cried. Somehow his pain was the thing that was really making her feel sick.
"You don't have to be so hard on yourself because you couldn't kill him, moonlight." Peter said with a chuckle. "You'll be able to at some point."
But she shook her head as she looked at her hands, "I won't."
"Oh, of course you will."
But she shook her head once more, "No, I won't. Because I don't want to." She turned to him, her eyes firm as he glanced at her. "I don't want anything to happen to him, alright?"
"Scarlett—"
"Nothing, Peter," She insisted. "You have to promise me that you'll leave him out of this."
The silence that followed had a shape she recognized. Not an agreement yet not a refusal. The specific quality of Peter considering how much something was going to cost him and whether the price was worth paying at this particular moment.
"He's already in this," Peter said finally. His voice was gentle, which was worse than if it hadn't been.
"No he's not," she insisted. "He's not a werewolf, he's not your Beta, all of this has nothing to do with him." She held his gaze when he turned to look at her. "Promise me."
The silence felt like an eternity in her mind, but she did not look away from him.
"You have my word," Peter said. Pleasantly. The way he said everything. Then he turned away to look the road.
She looked at his profile for a moment — the specific quality of his ease, the unhurried confidence of someone who had never needed to raise his voice to get what he wanted — and she believed him.
Since he had helped her out of her grave, Peter had always kept his promises to her. Always.
She looked back at the road.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
The mall was large and bright and completely uninterested in what was moving through it.
Scarlett walked beside Peter through the afternoon crowd — she had stopped walking behind him somewhere between the car park and the entrance, a small correction she had made without deciding to, which she suspected he had noticed and chosen not to comment on. They were there because of her. Before disappearing from school Lydia had told her to go together with Allison to buy the dress for the Formal that day.
She had forgotten about that.
No — that wasn't true. She hadn't forgotten. She had remembered it every day since, in the way she remembered things she was trying not to think about, which was the same as thinking about them constantly. She had remembered it the morning after, sitting on the couch with the DVD in her lap. She had remembered it in the car on the way to the clinic. She was remembering it now, walking through a mall on a Thursday afternoon with Peter at her side and Jennifer in the trunk of a car they needed to get rid of.
Stiles had asked her to the Formal.
He had asked her the way he did things when he was nervous — flushed, slightly stumbling, the words coming out faster than he'd intended, his hands doing that thing they did when he didn't know what to do with them. And she had said yes, and she had meant it. She really did.
She had even tried to imagine the dress she would have wear.
Something dark, something that would make him do that thing with his face, that open helpless brightness he could never quite contain.
She had imagined his expression when he saw her.
She had looked forward to it with something she had not known how to name at the time and could name now with perfect accuracy and wished she couldn't.
Again her eyes stang, and she had to compose herself as she walked.
Continuo esattamente da dove hai lasciato.
She kept her eyes on the crowd and walked beside Peter and did not think about the dress.
They found a position near a pillar on the ground floor, close enough to the entrance to see who came in, far enough from the centre to go unnoticed. Peter was very good at this — the particular stillness of someone who had spent years watching things from the right distance. She had learned it from him. She was using it now.
They waited.
The mall kept doing its Thursday afternoon things around them. A child dropped an ice cream and cried. Two women argued quietly about something near the directory board. A man sat on a bench with his phone and didn't look up once.
Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.
Then Lydia came through the entrance with Allison, and Scarlett felt her chest do something she chose not to examine, but her mind asked itself if they wondered where she had gone. It has been fun to go shopping with them. They managed to do it sometimes, the three of them. Scarlett had thought it would have been much worst, but she had actually enjoyed it.
Do I want to go shopping with Allison and Lydia? She asked herself, surprised by her own thoughts as she saw the girls. Why?
Peter said nothing. He simply looked at her, briefly, and then looked back at the entrance.
She did not acknowledge it, but they moved inside. Was he really about to attack Allison?
So what? She told herself nervously.
Scarlett followed at the distance she had learned — close enough to see, far enough to be furniture. The store was large, formal wear on one side, everything else on the other, the particular organised chaos of a Saturday afternoon in a place where half the town was apparently buying something to wear to the same event.
Allison drifted toward the far end of the store almost immediately, her attention caught by something on a rack on the left of the shop. While Lydia went the other direction, looking through so many dresses that Scarlett felt confused for her.
But then she saw him.
Stiles...
He was behind Lydia, who kept piling dresses over and over on Stiles' arms, and he kept following her around the shop.
Why's he here? Scarlett thought, finding impossible to stop her feet from following them. Why is he shopping with Lydia?
She already knew why. She just wasn't letting herself say it directly, the way she hadn't been letting herself say a lot of things directly lately, because saying things directly made them real in a way that was harder to manage.
She followed them anyway. Two racks over, her back to a display of evening wear, close enough to hear.
Lydia was moving through the rack with the focused efficiency of someone who had already done the research and was here to execute. She pulled something out, considered it for approximately one second, and handed it to Stiles without looking at him.
He took it. Added it to the stack on his arms. The stack was getting architectural.
"That one's not even my size," he said.
"It's for reference."
"Reference for what—"
"Reference for the colour palette, Stiles, keep up." She pulled out something else. Handed it over. "And hold them properly, you're creasing the shoulders."
He adjusted his grip with the expression of someone who had given up on having opinions but was maintaining a small internal protest on principle.
Scarlett watched him from behind the rack and told herself to stop watching him.
She didn't stop.
"—and I'm thinking light shirt and the dark tie for you," Lydia said, moving to a different section with Stiles trailing behind her. "It'll work with what I'm wearing."
"If you've chosen why am I holding all these dresses?" he asked with raised eyebrows.
"You never know," Lydia said picking up another dress.
"Yeah, I can see that," Stiles answered with a nod of her his head.
Then Scarlett saw Lydia look around, as Stiles kept trying to keep the dresses in his arms to not let them fall on the ground. "Oh, right the shoes."
Stiles' eyes widened, "Shoes?"
"Yeah, Stiles," Lydia stated as a matter of fact. "The Formal is tomorrow night, I'm not leaving this without the shoes."
Tomorrow night.
The words hit the way they always hit now — quiet, precise, finding the specific place that had been left open and pressing into it without mercy. Scarlett's hands tightened around the rack in front of her.
Tomorrow night.
Scarlett's hands found the rack.
Lydia was already moving toward the shoes section, talking, Stiles trailing behind her with his arms full of dresses, and they were going to the Formal together tomorrow night and they were going to dance together tomorrow night and she was going to be right there next to him all evening, close, and—
The rack bent under her grip.
She looked at Lydia's back. At her hair. At the easy way she moved, at the way she said his name when she wanted him to follow, at the way he did, every single time, without even thinking about it.
Her jaw ached.
Her fangs were begging for her to let them come out. She didn't care if there were so many people around.
He asked her. After everything. He asked her?
Scarlett's grip tightened until the metal groaned softly between her fingers, and she looked at the line of Lydia's throat and held her breath and did not move.
She focused on that and only that and breathed and looked at the floor and did not look at them and felt the burning behind her eyes get worse anyway, the way it always did when she tried to stop it.
Stop.
She had imagined his face when he saw her. She had actually imagined it. And now, he was going with Lydia. He would have looked at Lydia wearing a pretty dress, now. He would have dance with her, laugh with her. The pain in her chest came back, strong and burning. It was burning so much.
The back of her hand pressed hard against her mouth.
Not now. She was not going to do this here, not in this store, not in the middle of a mall on an afternoon, not like this.
She just needed to move. She needed distance and air and somewhere that wasn't here, somewhere she couldn't hear either of their voices, somewhere the back of her eyes could do whatever they were going to do without anyone watching.
She shifted sideways, one step, turning away from them—
A hand closed around her wrist, making her turn. And Scarlett went still when she saw who it was.
"Stiles..." she whispered.
He looked at her with a hard stare, "What are you doing here?" His hand still gripping her wrist, his fingers laying were her pulse would have been if she still had one.
And she forced herself to straightened her posture, "Shopping," she said. "Like you, I believe."
He let out a dry chuckle, "You used to lie better," Scarlett jaw tensed at those words, but he didn't let go. "Scott told me what Peter wants. What he's been planning to do." His eyes were on her face. "Is that why you're here? Allison?"
She pulled her wrist gently. His grip didn't loosen.
"Let me go," she said quietly.
"Are you here for her?"
"Let me go." Her voice stayed even. "Don't make me hurt you."
He shook his head, his eyes widened in disbelief, "Are you really up to hurt her too for him?"
Her eyes remained on his, her jaw trembling a bit, "If Scott collaborates--"
"Oh, my God, are you even listening to yourself?!" He exclaimed. She tensed at his tone and tried again to pull away. But he didn't let her go. The distance between them was two feet. She was aware of it with the precision she couldn't turn off.
"This is just going to make things worst—"
His eyes sharpened, "Are you threatening me?" She shook her head, biting her lips.
"I'm warning you," she insisted, looking him in the eyes, "Peter won't stop at anything, Stiles. He's not one that gives up. And he will find a way to take Scott with him."
He shook his head once, sharp. "You mean with you," He looked at her, his jaw tight.
"Stiles—"
"No," He took a step toward her, and she held still because moving away from him felt wrong in a way she couldn't explain and moving toward him felt worse. "If you think we'll help you hurt more people, you didn't undertand anything about us."
"You're just going to make it worse," The words came out quiet and flat and completely direct. "We can't stop, Stiles... I can't."
"There's no any reason to?" He asked almost softly, as his eyes glistened under the lights of the shop. Her chest tightened, but after a moment it seemed like he understood what he had just said. And passing a hand over his face, he turned to look at her. "Go away, and leave Allison and Lydia, out of this." His gaze got harder. "I mean it, Scarlett."
He let go of her wrist.
Not because she had pulled. He just opened his hand and stepped back and looked at her for one more second — that look, the one she recognized and wished she didn't, the one that was doing several things at once and none of them simple — and then he turned and walked away.
She watched him reach Lydia, who handed him something without looking up. He took it. He did not look back.
Scarlett stood where she was.
She became aware, gradually, that her hands needed somewhere to go. She put them in her jacket pockets. Then she looked at a fixed point on the opposite wall — a display of evening bags, silver and black, arranged in a neat row, completely irrelevant — and breathed.
There's no any reason to?
He had said it almost softly. Like the question had slipped out before he'd decided to ask it. And she had not been able to answer because the answer was sitting in her chest like a stone
Keep breathing, Scarlett kept saying to herself. Control it. It's all about control.
But the burning in her eyes didn't want to go away.
She breathed through it the way she had learned to breathe through things that hurt, looking at the evening bags, thinking about nothing, letting the sounds of the mall fill the space where her thoughts were trying to go.
It took longer than it should have.
When she finally looked up, she found him immediately.
Peter was standing on the other side of the store, near a rack of suits he was not looking at. Looking at her instead. Still, the way he was always still — that particular quality of someone who had been watching something carefully for long enough to have finished forming his opinion of it.
His eyes met hers across the store.
She held his gaze for a moment.
Then she looked away first, which she hated, and straightened her back, and did not look at the shoes section, and waited for this to be over.