Chapter 4: What the Alpha Kept

KAEL

I stayed in the old watchtower until the moon went down, because it was the only place in Ironmoor where nobody would come looking for me.

From up there I'd watched her walk between the stones. She didn't look back. I'd have understood if she had. I'd have understood if she'd turned and screamed my name across two miles of frost. She just went into the trees, small and straight in Rowan's coat, and the forest closed behind her like water.

The bond doesn't break when you say the words. People think it does. It tears, and then it keeps tearing, a little at a time, like a stitch working loose from cloth. By dawn it felt as if someone had worked a hook in under my ribs and was leaning on it.

I deserved worse. I knew that.

Rowan found me at sunrise. He came up the ladder slowly, the way you'd approach a dog that has already bitten someone.

"She's across," he said.

"I saw."

"I gave her my coat."

"I saw that too."

He waited. Rowan has known me since we were six, and he's the only wolf in the pack who can stand in a silence with me without trying to fill it. Usually I'm grateful.

"Rogues were running on the north side last night," he said. "Bram's lot. Tam heard them from the gate."

Everything in me went still.

"You sent her out there alone." It wasn't a question, and it wasn't quite an accusation either. "I've followed every order you've given me since you took this pack, Kael. I'll follow this one. But I'd like to know why."

I could have told him. He's the one person I might have told.

"Go and eat something," I said instead. "Then take four and ride the north boundary. Quietly."

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he went down the ladder, and I took the letter out of my shirt.

It had been on my pillow three nights ago. No seal, no name. The paper smelled of nothing at all, which is harder to manage than it sounds. Someone had soaked it in wolfsbane water to strip every trace of scent. The handwriting was neat and plain, like a clerk's.

Claim the omega's girl at the Blood Moon, and she will not live to wear your mark. Reject her, and she lives. You will not find us before we find her.

I'd read it until the creases wore thin. I'd searched the east cottages without telling anyone why. I'd had Wenna go through the kitchen stores for poison and set two of my own warriors to follow Seraphina through the market, and she never noticed them, because she never noticed anyone watching her. Nobody ever had.

Three days. I'd found nothing.

So I stood in that clearing with the smell of rain and cedar knocking the breath out of me, and I did the one thing the letter asked, because it was the only way I could be sure she walked out of Ironmoor alive.

I hadn't thought about rogues on the north side.

I hadn't thought past the clearing at all.

"There you are."

Cassia's head appeared at the top of the ladder. She'd changed out of the silver dress into something plainer, but her hair was still pinned up from the night before and she smelled of rosewater.

"The elders want to talk about the Luna ceremony," she said. "Mother thinks the first of next month. Before the snow."

"Not now."

She climbed the rest of the way anyway and came to stand beside me at the rail. After a moment she laid her hand on my arm.

I didn't move it away. I made myself not move it away.

"You did the right thing last night," she said softly. "I know it was hard. But she'd never have been strong enough. Everyone could see it."

I looked down at her hand.

"And it's kinder to her, really," Cassia went on. "At least this way she's alive."

The wind moved through the pines below us. Down in the yard a door banged.

At least this way she's alive.

I hadn't shown that letter to a living soul.

"Kael?" She was watching my face. "What is it?"

"Nothing." My voice came out perfectly level. I'd been Alpha long enough to manage that much. "Tell your mother the first of the month is fine."

She smiled, pleased, kissed my cheek, and went back down the ladder.

I stayed where I was until I heard hooves on the north road. Fast. Much faster than a quiet patrol has any reason to ride.

Rowan didn't bother with the ladder. He shouted up from the foot of the tower.

"We found the trail. Rogues ran her to the Scar." The ravine. Ninety feet of rock, then the river. "Her coat's snagged on the edge. There's nothing past it, Kael. She went over."

For a second I couldn't hear anything at all.

"Take the dogs down to the water," I said. "Every mile of it."

"The river's in flood. If she went in, she's..."

"I didn't ask what she is." I was already on the ladder. "I told you to find her."