**Chapter 15** **The Earring**

*Kael*

I woke up on a stone floor.

For a moment I didn't know where I was. The stone was cold under my cheek. Grey morning light was coming through tall windows. Somewhere outside, gulls were crying over the sea.

And I was warm.

That was the first strange thing. I had fallen asleep on a cold stone floor with no shirt on, and I was warm. I looked down. There was a thick blue blanket over me. Someone had tucked it around my shoulders, carefully, the way a mother tucks in a child.

Then I lifted my head and saw the bed.

She was asleep.

She was sitting up against the headboard with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them. Her head had fallen to one side. Her long dark hair had spilled down over her shoulder like a curtain. She looked very small in that big bed. She looked tired, even in her sleep. There were dark shadows under her eyes.

She had sat there all night, watching me. Until she couldn't keep her eyes open anymore.

I sat up slowly. My head felt strange. Light. Clear. Like a window that had been washed.

And then I understood the second strange thing.

I had slept.

Not the thin, broken sleep I'd been fighting with for four nights now. Not lying in bed staring at the ceiling, reaching for a silent bond. Real sleep. Deep and dark and quiet, the kind of sleep I hadn't had since I was a boy.

On my wife's floor.

I got up very quietly. I folded the blue blanket and put it at the end of her bed. She didn't wake. She only made a small sound and pulled her knees a little closer.

I stood there for a moment and looked at her. At her tired face. At the bruise on her cheek, almost gone now, just a yellow shadow. At her small hands. There were little red marks all over her fingers, dozens of them, from the needle. From sewing all night to save my mother's dress.

Something in my chest went tight.

Then I turned around and walked back through the door, and locked it behind me.

---

I was angry for most of the morning.

Angry at myself. That was the worst kind of angry, because there was no one to fight.

I had a mate. I had marked her four nights ago with my own teeth. She was out there somewhere, alone, maybe frightened, maybe hurt. And instead of finding her, I had walked in my sleep into another woman's room and lain down at her feet like a dog.

What kind of man does that?

"You look terrible," Rowan said when I came down to breakfast.

"I slept."

He put down his cup. "You slept? Really slept?"

"Yes."

"Kael, that's wonderful. That's the first time since…"

"On her floor," I said.

Rowan stared at me.

"I woke up on her floor," I said. "I don't remember walking there. I don't remember anything. I went to bed in my own room, and I woke up on the floor beside her bed with a blanket over me."

For a long moment, Rowan didn't say anything. Then a slow smile started on his face.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was only going to say," Rowan said, picking his cup back up, "that your wolf seems to like her."

"My wolf is confused," I said. "My wolf has a mate, and the bond went quiet, and he's lost. He's looking for her everywhere. In every room. In every face. He's just… confused."

"If you say so."

"I say so."

Rowan drank his tea and didn't argue. But he kept smiling into his cup, and I wanted to throw something at him.

I pushed my plate away. I hadn't eaten anything.

"I'm going back," I said.

"Back where?"

"To the spring. The Weeping Spring. Alone."

Rowan's smile went away. "Kael, we've searched that whole forest. Our best trackers went over every inch of it. There's nothing there."

"Then I'll find nothing," I said. "But I'm going."

---

I ran there as a wolf.

It's faster that way, over the hills, through the pine forests and down into the green valleys. And when I'm a wolf, my head is quieter. The wolf doesn't think the way a man does. He just runs and smells and listens. He doesn't feel guilty.

I reached the Weeping Spring a little after noon.

It looked smaller in the daylight. A little pond behind the ruins of an old stone mill, with moss all around the edges and tall reeds on one side. The water was very still and very clear. Willow trees hung over it, their long branches touching the surface.

I shifted back into a man at the edge of the clearing. I pulled on the clothes I had tied to my back. Then I just stood there for a long moment, breathing.

The rogues' stink was mostly gone now. Four days of wind and dew had washed it away. But under it, faint and fading, I could still smell her.

Wild honey. Moonflowers.

My chest hurt.

I walked across the clearing to the place by the water where the moss was thickest. I knew the spot. I would have known it with my eyes closed. This was where I had laid my coat down for her. This was where she had looked up at me in the dark and said, *Don't leave*.

I knelt down on the moss. I put my hand flat on it.

*Where are you?* I thought. *Why did you go?*

Did I frighten her? Did I hurt her? I had tried to be so careful. I had asked her, again and again, if she wanted me to stop. She never said yes. She held on to me like she was drowning.

So why did she run?

I sat on the moss for a long time with the sun on my back. And then I did something I hadn't done since I was a very small boy.

I lay down on the ground and put my face in the moss and breathed in her smell like it was the last air in the world.

That was when I felt it. Something small and hard, under my cheek.

I sat up. I pushed the moss aside with my fingers.

Something silver was shining down there, half buried in the soft green. I picked it up and held it in my palm.

It was an earring.

A small one. Very simple. A little crescent moon made of thin silver, no bigger than my fingernail. Hanging from the bottom point of the moon was a tiny round white stone, milky and soft, like a drop of frozen milk.

It wasn't expensive. It wasn't fancy. It was the kind of earring a poor girl might wear every day of her life because it was the only pair she had.

I held it up to my nose.

Honey. Moonflowers. Her.

My hand closed around it so hard that the little silver points dug into my palm.

*It's hers.*

She had worn this. She had been lying here, on this moss, under me, and it had fallen from her ear. And she hadn't even noticed, because she was too busy running away.

I sat on the moss for a long time, holding that tiny piece of silver. And for the first time in four days, the silent bond inside me moved. Just a little. Not a sound. Not a feeling. Just a small, soft shift, like someone turning over in their sleep in another room.

*She's alive,* I thought. *Wherever she is, she's alive. And I will find her.*

I put the earring in my shirt pocket, right over my heart. Then I stood up to go.

On the way out of the clearing, I found something else.

At the edge of the reeds, half hidden in the mud, there were tracks. Old ones, almost washed away. The rogues. My trackers had found these too, and followed them north toward the mountains, where they disappeared.

But there was one set of tracks they had missed.

It was one man. Big, heavy boots. He hadn't gone north with the others. He had gone east, along the stream, very carefully, stepping on stones where he could, so his tracks would be hard to find. He was clever, this one.

I followed them. They went a long way. Through the old forest, across a small field, over a broken fence.

And then they stopped.

I stood at the end of those tracks and looked around me, and I felt cold all over.

I knew where I was. I had been here four days ago. Standing in the square, smelling thirty-one girls.

The tracks stopped at the back fence of the Hollowmere Gamma's land. Right at the edge of his garden. Not two hundred steps from his kitchen door.

---

It was dark when I got home.

Rowan was waiting for me in my study. He was sitting by the fire with his elbows on his knees. When I came in, he stood up fast.

"Did you find anything?"

I took the earring out of my pocket and held it up.

Rowan's eyes went wide. He came closer and looked at it in the firelight. "Is it hers?"

"It's hers."

"Goddess." He let out a long breath. "So she was real. She was really there."

"Of course she was real."

"I know. I know. I just…" He rubbed his face. "Part of me was starting to think you dreamed her, Kael."

I put the earring down on my desk, in the middle of all my papers. It looked so small there. So small and so lost.

"There's more," I said. "One of the rogues didn't run north with the others. His tracks went east. To Hollowmere. To the back fence of the Gamma's house."

Rowan went quiet. Very quiet.

"Why would a rogue go to the Gamma's house?" he asked slowly.

"I don't know yet." I sat down hard in my chair. "But I'm going to find out."

Rowan didn't sit down. He stood there in front of my desk with a strange look on his face. Like he had something to say and didn't want to say it.

"What?" I said.

"I did what you asked," he said. "Yesterday, before the wedding. I had our old healer look at the Hale girl's mark. Selene's. I told her it was to check why the bond was silent. She didn't like it, but she let him look."

"And?"

Rowan was quiet for a moment.

"He says the mark is fresh, Kael. Too fresh. A mating mark from four nights ago should be healing by now. Going smooth, the edges closing. Hers is still raw. Still red." He looked at me. "He says it looks like it was made yesterday. Or the day before. Like someone is keeping it open."

I didn't move. "What else?"

"There's one more thing. He measured it. The teeth marks." Rowan swallowed. "He says they're too small, Kael. Much too small. Those aren't your teeth. Those aren't a man's teeth at all."

The fire crackled. Outside, the sea crashed on the rocks.

"Whoever put that mark on Selene Hale's neck," Rowan said quietly, "was a woman."

I looked down at the little silver moon on my desk for a long moment. Then I looked up.

"Watch her," I said. "Day and night. Every door she opens. Every letter she sends. Every person she speaks to."

My voice came out so cold that Rowan took a step back.

"And if she so much as breathes near my wife," I said, "I want to know about it before she lets the breath out."