Chapter 13

Ronan’s POV

“Say it out loud,” Rhys says, “so you have to hear yourself say it.”

We’re in Garrick’s own study with the door shut and his own brandy on the desk between us, and he’s locked in a room at the end of his own corridor with two of my men on it, which is illegal in about four different ways.

“I’m claiming her.”

“Under what.”

“Pack claim. Article nine. A standing Alpha may extend claim over an unbound wolf in danger of trafficking across a border, and that claim carries the right of pursuit into neighboring territory without a council hearing.”

“Article nine,” Rhys repeats. “Which was written for cargo runs and orphans, and which requires the wolf in question to be, and I’m quoting the actual document here, of the claiming Alpha’s household or intended household.”

“Yes.”

“So say the other part.”

“Rhys.”

“Say the other part,” he says, “because in about nine hours a clerk in Blackthorn Vale is going to read your paper out loud in front of witnesses, and I would rather you heard it first from a friend.”

I put the pen down.

“It’s a mate claim,” I say.

“It’s a mate claim.” Rhys sits on the edge of the desk. “Filed in her absence, without her word, on a woman you have spoken to twice. That’s not a technicality, Ronan. Once that’s stamped, every pack from here to the coast reads it the same way, and there is no clean unfiling of it. If she wakes up one day and wants none of you, you have made her an Alpha’s property in public record to save her from being somebody else’s.”

“She’ll be alive.”

“She’ll be yours on paper whether she wants it or not, which is precisely the sentence her brother has been living inside for six years.” He lets that sit exactly as long as it needs to. “I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying know what you’re doing before you do it, because you have a habit.”

“Of what?”

“Of saving people in the shape that’s most convenient for you to save them in.”

That lands. I’d rather it hadn’t.

“Then give me another way to cross that water legally in the next day.”

“There isn’t one.”

“Then we’re done talking.”

“We’re not, actually.” Rhys reaches into his coat and drops a fold of paper on the ledger. “Because there’s a thing I’ve been chewing since the cottage, and I hate it, and you’re going to hate it more.”

“Say it.”

“Garrick said they had people in three councils. He said they had people in yours.”

“Cowards say that.”

“Cowards do.” He opens the fold. “This is the collection schedule out of the ledger. Sheets went out of this house on the ninth of every month, and a boy came for them. Same boy. Six years. Garrick never asked his name, because Garrick has never asked anyone’s name in his life.”

“And?”

“And the ninth of every month, our own supply run comes down the north road from Ravencross to the Thornhollow line and back,” Rhys says. “Same day. Every month. For six years.”

The room gets very quiet.

“Whose run.”

“Ours. Signed off by the quartermaster, driven by whoever’s rostered.” He looks up. “But the roster has one name on it every single ninth, going back further than I’ve been beta. He volunteers for it. I always thought he liked the road.”

“Say the name.”

“Ronan.”

“Say the name, Rhys.”

“Corrin,” he says.

Corrin, who taught me to hold a blade when I was eleven years old. Corrin, who carried my mother out of the burning east wing and put her down in the yard and stayed with the body until morning because I was too small to be allowed near it. Corrin, who has stood at my right shoulder at every council I have ever sat.

“No,” I say.

“That’s what I said for about an hour.”

“He was there when they killed her.”

“Yes,” Rhys says. “He was.”

And something goes through me then that I will spend a long time trying not to look at directly, because the note in my jacket asked me a question this morning and I have been refusing to answer it.

Ask yourself how you knew.

How I knew. How a scent I’d never met in twenty seven years stopped me dead in a stranger’s hallway. How something in my own blood sat up and answered it.

They didn’t find Wren because Garrick got careless.

They found her because I did.

“Rhys.”

“I’m here.”

“Who moved my schedule?” I say. “Who told Garrick Thornhollow I was coming next week instead of yesterday?”

Rhys’s face changes very slowly.

“Corrin drew up the itinerary,” he says.

“Then somebody sent me into that house early on purpose,” I say, “and stood back, and waited to see whether I’d stop in the hallway.”

I stand up and take my coat off the chair, and I am already at the door when the shouting starts in the corridor, and one of my men hits the study door hard enough to crack the frame.

“Alpha. The prisoner.”

“What about him.”

“Gone,” he says. “Window’s open, the guard’s on the floor breathing, and there’s a horse missing from the east stable.”

“Which way.”

“North, Alpha.” He swallows. “Home. Toward Ravencross.”