MasukJace"Give me a moment."I turned the pages slower now, and I couldn’t find anything in a straight line. The thing wouldn't let me. Every page I turned had me on a different study of it, and each one stopped me before I could get past it. The figure from the back, the long muscles of it laid in like rope under the skin. The skull alone, big as a horse's and shaped like nothing that grazes. A hand again, opened flat, the claw at each fingertip drawn from three sides so you couldn't tell yourself you'd misread it.Then a run of pages on the inside of the thing, and those were worse. I can't read a word of that book. But a drawing of a heart is a heart, and the heart in those pages was wrong. Too big for the chest it sat in. Ringed around its middle with something the maker had pressed in heavier ink, the thing armored under its own skin. There were organs I had no name for, set where a man keeps nothing. There was a study of the throat opened up that I stopped on and then turned past.
JaceThe corridor he took me down got narrower and colder the further we went. I have learned over a long, careful life to pay attention when a powerful man walks you somewhere quiet.He didn't talk on the way. The arm I'd laid across his shoulders had come off somewhere around the second turn, naturally, the moment its work was done. Now he was a step ahead of me, a wall of a man moving through his own house, and I followed, because the only thing worse than following him would have been making him ask twice. The torches got fewer. The noise of the hall fell off behind us until it was a rumor of itself. I counted the doors we passed, the turns we took, the same as I count everything, because a man who knows the way out is never quite as trapped as he looks.We stopped at a door at the end of it. He opened it himself and stood aside and waited for me to go in first, which is not a courtesy. You put a man in a room ahead of you when you want to be the one between him and the door.I w
SeraI held her eyes, level. "What do you want, Taya. You've paid your respects. You can go enjoy the rest of your night."The sympathy slid off her like it had never been fixed on. She held my eyes a moment, then she dipped her head, the picture of courtesy again. "Enjoy the feast, my Luna." She turned to go.She got one step and stopped.When she came back around the courtesy was gone off her face. What was under it was quieter than I expected, and worse for being quiet. Her eyes went to me, then to Mina, then back."My father hates you," she said plainly, like she was setting down a fact we both already owned. "He'd have fought you to his last breath. He told me so."I watched her and said nothing."And then." She stopped. Something worked at the corner of her mouth, and for a moment the hate in her had confusion tangled all through it, a daughter who couldn't make the pieces fit."Then he turns overnight. Now he's your dog. Moving through the keep making sure no one so much as loo
Sera"What?""Do you think your brother would hurt you on purpose? Knowing it would get to you." I held her eyes. "Hurting Jace is hurting you. He knows that. He's not a stupid man and he loves you. So. Do you think he'd do that to you on purpose?"She was quiet for a while. Long enough that I let it sit."No," she said finally. "No. He wouldn't.""Then stop chewing your own hand off."She almost laughed. It came out broken, but it came out. Her shoulders dropped a finger's width. After a moment she reached into the bowl and took a berry, then another, and I let myself feel the small clean satisfaction of having talked one person I loved down off a ledge today. It was more than I'd managed for myself.My eyes went back to the doorway. I couldn't help it. Whatever Fenris was saying to him in there, I couldn't touch it from here, and I made myself not care. There was nothing Jace could tell my husband that would cost me anything. I'd handed Fenris the worst of it with my own mouth three
SeraI watched my husband walk my friend's whole heart out of the hall with an arm around his neck, and I let none of it show. A Luna doesn't get to show things. That is the first thing this place taught me.Beside me Mina let out a breath that shook on the way out of her."To the gods," she said, low, "I hope he doesn't kill him.""You mean Fenris." I let a little amusement into it, because she needed me light, and because the alternative was letting her see I'd had the same thought for half a second before I'd put it away. "Your brother. The one you've trusted your whole life.""That's not fair.""It's a little fair." I picked at the edge of the board in front of me. "You don't trust him?""Of course I trust him." She was still watching the doorway they'd gone through, her hands flat on the table like she might push up out of the chair. "I trust him with me. I don't know what he wants with Jace. Isn't it too soon for this? They met two days ago. What's there to talk about that can't
JaceIt worried me more than the Alpha's nose did. I'd started telling myself the familiarity would help. Sera and I had always been easy with each other in the old days, cool and good, two clever people who recognized each other across a room full of people who weren't. I'd let myself believe that would carry. Sitting at that table with her eyes coming and going off me, I understood I'd miscounted. The woman across from me could end Blackwater's chances with a single quiet word in her husband's ear. She could refuse. She could stop the Alpha lifting a finger. She could, if she decided I was more trouble than I was worth, point a thousand Northern wolves down the mountain and there wouldn't be a Blackwater left to save, and it would cost her nothing.For one warm idiot second I thought about laying it out right there, while Fenris was full and easy and liked me. Raising Blackwater at the table, letting the Alpha's good humor do some of the work. I killed the thought before it finish
SeraNight fell fast, and with it, the temperature plummeted. We had three fires going, but the heat didn't seem to travel more than six inches past the flames. I sat on a log by the middle fire, pulling the wagon fur around my shoulders, shivering so hard my teeth were literally clicking together.
LyraShe ignored me. She dropped to her knees, her hands sliding down to the waistband of my trousers. She shoved her fingers inside the fabric, gripping my hips tight. With one sharp pull, she dragged the pants and my underwear down to my ankles. I stepped out of them, kicking my boots off in the
Lyra"Tell the girl to step into the room," he said."Leave her out of this," I said. My voice came out as a pathetic, raspy whisper. I cleared my throat, trying to find some spine. "She didn't do anything. It was my idea to come in here.""Tell her to step into the room," he said, his eyes going d
LyraThe voice didn't belong to Nadia. It didn't belong to me. It came from the metallic object resting directly behind my hip.Nadia froze. She pulled her mouth away from me and yanked her fingers out of my body. She stood up quickly, wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand, her chest heavi







