Chapter 5: Roses and Threats

Nyra's POV

I didn't knock.

Lyra's door banged against the wall so hard that a vase rattled on its stand. She was sitting at her dressing table in a silk robe, brushing out her hair, and she didn't even turn around.

"You're up early," she said to the mirror.

"Where is he?" I held up the wooden wolf. My hand was shaking so badly the little thing trembled. "What did you do to him?"

"Lower your voice. The Alpha's rooms are just down the hall."

"I don't care."

"You should." She set the brush down and finally turned. Without her powder, her face looked sharper. Older. "Close the door, Nyra."

"Tell me where my son is."

There. I'd said it out loud. Son. The word hung in the air between us, and Lyra smiled like I'd handed her a gift.

"He's exactly where you left him," she said. "In that damp little cottage with the old woman and her stinking herbs." She picked a thread off her sleeve. "One of my men has been watching it since the day your stepfather agreed to the treaty. The window was open. The toy was on the sill. Children leave things lying everywhere, don't they?"

"If anything happens to him..."

"Nothing will happen to him." She stood up and walked toward me slowly. "As long as you understand how things work here."

"How what works?"

"This." She waved a hand at the room, the house, all of it. "Lucan is mine. He's been mine for five years. I was there when he woke up. I sat by his bed every night. I held his hand through the fevers."

"You lied to him."

"I comforted him." Her eyes went hard. "And at the next full moon, he'll name me Luna in front of every pack in the north. You'll stand in the front row and clap."

"And if I don't?"

She leaned in until I could smell the roses on her skin. "Then a little boy with grey eyes wanders into the woods one night and never comes back. Wolves get hungry in winter, Nyra. Nobody would even be surprised."

My knees went weak. I grabbed the doorframe to keep from falling.

"Stay away from him," she said softly. "No more stables at midnight. No more running down to the river." Her lip curled. "Oh yes, I know about that too. You smell of him, you stupid girl. I smelled it the moment you walked in."

My face burned.

"Today you'll go to him," she went on, "and you'll ask for rooms in the far wing. Tell him he frightens you. Tell him you find him cold. I don't care what you say. Just make him stop looking at you."

"He doesn't look at me."

Lyra laughed. "Oh, darling. He does nothing else."

Someone knocked on the open door behind me. A guard stood there, a big man with a shaved head and a face like a closed fist.

"Lady Nyra." He didn't quite look at me. "The Alpha wants you in the great hall. Now."

Lyra's eyebrows rose. She looked delighted.

"Oh dear," she murmured. "What have you done?"

The great hall was full again, but there was no feast this time. Warriors in leather and steel lined both walls, and every one of them turned to watch me walk in. At the far end, Lucan sat in the Alpha's chair with his elbows on his knees, turning something small and silver over and over in his fingers.

In front of him, on his knees on the stone floor, was Pip.

His wrists were tied behind his back. His lip was split and swollen, and there was dried blood on his chin. When he saw me, his eyes went wide with panic, and he gave a tiny shake of his head. Don't.

I stopped in the middle of the hall. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

"Wife," Lucan said. "Come closer."

I walked forward until I stood beside Pip. I didn't look at the boy. I couldn't.

"My eastern patrol found this one an hour before dawn," Lucan said. His voice was calm. Too calm. "Riding hard toward the Ashfall border. On one of my horses."

"I stole her, Alpha!" Pip blurted. "I stole the mare, I'm sorry, I'll work it off, I swear..."

"Quiet."

Pip shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.

Lucan held up the thing in his fingers. It caught the light from the high windows. A thin silver ring with a tiny moonstone set in it, worn smooth from years on my mother's hand.

"They found this in his pocket," he said. "Is it yours?"

The hall was silent.

"He took it, Alpha," a warrior near the front called out. "Boy's a thief. Thieves get forty lashes in Blackmoor. Always have."

Forty lashes.

My back remembered before I did. Cold snow under my knees. The crack of the whip. The way the skin had split on the twelfth stroke, and how I'd stopped feeling anything after the twentieth. I had been nineteen and twice Pip's size, and I had barely lived through it.

"Well?" Lucan said. "Is it yours or not?"

"It's not hers," Pip said desperately. "I found it, I took it from her room, she didn't even..."

"I gave it to him."

Pip made a small, broken sound.

Every head in the hall turned toward me. Lucan didn't move at all. He just looked at me, his grey eyes steady and unreadable.

"Say that again," he said.

"The ring is mine." My voice shook, but I made myself keep going. "I gave it to him. He didn't steal anything. I asked him to ride to Ashfall for me. If you want to punish someone, punish me."

A murmur rippled through the warriors. Somewhere behind me, I heard a soft laugh that smelled like roses.

Lucan sat back slowly in his chair.

"You asked him to ride to Ashfall," he repeated. "In the middle of the night. On my horse. After I told you no letters leave this pack without my seal."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I told you. I have an aunt..."

"You told me a lot of things." He stood up. The whole hall seemed to lean back a little. "Most of them were lies."

He came down the steps one at a time, slowly, and stopped in front of me. He was so close I had to tip my head back to see his face. His jaw was tight. There was a tiny muscle jumping in his cheek.

"Clear the hall," he said, without looking away from me.

Nobody moved for half a second.

"I said clear it!"

Boots scraped. Doors opened. Within a minute, the hall was empty except for the three of us: Lucan, me, and a trembling boy on his knees between us.

Lucan crouched down in front of Pip. He took a knife from his belt, and Pip flinched so hard he nearly fell over. But Lucan only reached behind him and cut the rope on his wrists.

Then he stood up again and looked at me.

"Now," he said quietly, "you're going to tell me exactly who you were sending him to. Every name. Every word of the message."

"And if I don't?"

He turned the ring over in his fingers one more time, then closed his fist around it.

"Then the boy gets his forty lashes anyway," he said. "And you'll stand right there and count every one of them out loud."