Chapter 5: Who locked your wolf

For a few seconds, I could not make myself move.

The black stain on the silver tray kept spreading, slow and hissing, and I stared at it the way you stare at a snake that has just missed you. My hands were shaking so badly that I had to press them against my knees, and I only noticed that Kaiden had knelt in front of me when I felt his warm fingers wrap around my wrist.

"Look at me, Liana," he said. "Did a single drop touch your mouth?"

"No. I was about to drink it, but I did not."

"Are you sure?"

"I am sure." My voice cracked. "You came in before I could."

He let out a long breath, and for a moment he lowered his forehead until it almost touched my hand. It was such a quiet, private thing to do that I forgot to be afraid. Then the door opened again, and Mira ran in with a jar of honey and a face as white as her apron.

"Heavens above," she gasped, looking at the broken cup. "I only left for a minute. Who brought this?"

"That is what I intend to find out," Kaiden said, and when he stood up, he was the cold Alpha King again, the one the whole hall had been afraid of. "Mira, stay with her. Dane!"

A tall, broad man with a scar across his chin stepped in from the hallway, and I realized that he must have been standing there the whole time. "Your Majesty."

"Send for Elara. Seal the kitchen and bring me every person who touched that tray tonight."

Elara turned out to be the castle healer, a small gray haired woman who arrived in her nightgown with a leather bag clutched to her chest. She knelt over the spilled tea and sniffed it once, and then she sat back on her heels so quickly that she almost fell.

"Moonthorn," she whispered.

"Is it deadly?" I asked.

"To most wolves, it only makes them sleepy." She looked up at Kaiden, and her eyes were frightened. "But it has been banned in the kingdom for sixty years, Your Majesty, because it was made for one purpose only. It kills the old blood. The pure line. The kind that is not supposed to exist anymore."

I looked from one of them to the other, and I felt a strange, creeping cold. "That makes no sense. I am wolfless. I do not have any blood to kill."

Nobody answered me.

Elara reached for my wrist, probably to check that I was all right, and the second her fingers touched my skin, she stopped. She leaned closer and breathed in, and the color drained from her face so fast that I thought she might faint.

"Your Majesty," she said in a thin voice. "Her scent. It was plain yesterday. Now it is..." She swallowed. "It is changing."

"Leave us, Elara."

"But if the seal..."

"Leave us," Kaiden said again, very softly, and the old woman grabbed her bag and almost ran out of the room.

I stood up slowly. My legs felt like water, but I made them hold. "What seal?"

"Liana."

"She said seal. What does she mean, my scent is changing? And why did you look at me like that when she said the old blood? What is going on, Kaiden?"

He opened his mouth, and I saw him choose his words with the same care he had used in the car, as if every sentence were a door he was afraid to open. But before he could answer, Dane appeared at the door again, breathing hard.

"We found the girl who prepared the tea," he said. "A new kitchen maid named Tessa. She swallowed the same poison when we closed in. She is in the infirmary, and she is not going to last the hour."

"Does she know who sent her?" Kaiden asked.

"She has not said a word. But Your Majesty..." Dane's eyes flicked to me. "She keeps asking for the Luna."

My stomach dropped. Kaiden stepped in front of me at once. "No."

"I want to go," I said.

"It is not safe."

"A girl just tried to poison me, and I do not even know why." I looked up at him, and for once I did not look away. "If she wants to see me, I am going to hear what she has to say. You can come with me, but you cannot stop me."

He stared at me for a long moment. Then something in his face gave way, and he nodded once.

The infirmary was a small white room at the end of a long stone corridor, and it smelled like herbs and smoke. The girl lay in a narrow bed with her red hair spread across the pillow. She could not have been older than nineteen, and her skin had gone the color of old paper. Her lips were already turning blue.

When I walked in, her eyes found me straight away.

"It is you," she breathed. "She was right. You have her face."

I stopped at the foot of the bed. "Whose face?"

"Your mother's." A faint, awful smile crossed her lips. "She told me you would be wearing it. The locket. She told me to look for the locket."

My hand flew up to the silver at my throat. "Who told you? Who sent you here?"

"Does not matter now." Her breath rattled, and she turned her head a little, and her eyes slid past me and settled on Kaiden, who stood very still just behind my shoulder. "Ask him. Ask your King why you have no wolf."

"Tessa," Kaiden said, and there was a warning in his voice that I had never heard before.

"Ask him who locked it." The girl's voice was fading, but each word landed like a stone. "Ask him who closed the door inside you, Liana. Ask him what he took."

Her hand fell open on the blanket. Her chest rose once, and then it did not rise again.

The room went so quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat. Dane bowed his head. Somewhere far away, a clock struck two.

I did not turn around right away, because I was afraid of what I would see if I did. All of the strange pieces from the last three days began to line up in my head, one by one: his men guarding my door, how he had known my name, the eleven years, the way he had gone pale when he saw my mother's locket, the way the healer had said seal.

When I finally turned, Kaiden was looking at me, and for the first time since I had met him, he did not look like a king. He looked like a man standing in front of a firing squad, waiting for the shot he had always known was coming.

"Kaiden," I whispered. My throat was so tight that it hurt. "Is it true? Did you lock my wolf?"

He did not look away. He did not lie, and somehow that made it worse. His gold eyes held mine, wet and steady, and when he spoke, his voice was barely more than breath.

"Yes. I did."

The floor seemed to tilt under my feet.

"But Liana," he said, and he took one step toward me, and his hand reached out and shook in the air between us, "I swear to you, it was not for the reason you think."