CHAPTER THREE

Forty-one steps led down to the cellar under the east wing. I counted every one, because counting kept me from screaming.

The air down there was thick and cold, like a grave that had never been shut. Blocks of river ice lay stacked in sawdust along one wall, dripping slowly into a brass drain. Bundles of silver-leaf, my silver-leaf, hung from the beams in dusty rows, and somebody had cut half of them down.

An iron door stood at the end of the passage. Two guards flanked it. They did not stop me. They studied their boots, the way wolves do when they have been given an order they do not like.

I shouldered the door open.

My father lay strapped to a steel table.

"Papa!"

His face was the color of ash. Black veins spread across his neck like roots through soil, and his lips had cracked and bled. A glass tube ran from the crook of his arm into a copper bowl, filling with dark red blood.

Selene stood at the foot of the table in a clean white coat, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She looked up and smiled as if I had walked into her kitchen.

"Don't touch the equipment, Lyra. It's delicate."

"What are you doing to him?"

"Helping." She lifted a small vial. The liquid inside was the same silver as the one she had shown the pack, but paler and thinner, like milk watered down. "Your father has Moonstone blood. It is very rare. My cure needs a little of it to hold."

My stomach turned over. "It's my formula. You know it's mine."

"Is it?" She tilted her head. "Name one person in that hall who thinks so."

I lunged for the table and clawed at the leather straps. My father's eyelids fluttered. "Lyra," he whispered, so softly I almost missed it. "Don't let them see ..."

"Don't talk, Papa. I've got you."

Selene tipped the pale liquid into the tube.

My father screamed.

It was the worst sound I had ever heard. His whole body bowed off the steel. The black veins surged up under his jaw, and foam collected at the corner of his mouth.

"Stop it!" I seized Selene's wrist and wrenched. "You're killing him!"

"It needs a few more doses," she said, perfectly calm. "It always gets worse before it gets better."

"Kael!" I did not know I had said it aloud until his name came back off the stone.

The iron door banged open. Kael stood there, chest heaving, hair damp, as if he had run the whole way from the study.

For one second, I saw it on his face. Fear. Raw, naked fear. It was there, and then it wasn't.

"Kael, please." I was crying now and could not stop. "She's killing him. He's my father. I am your mate."

The word hit the room like a thrown knife. Selene went rigid. One of the guards in the doorway sucked in a breath.

Kael's jaw clenched. He looked at my father. He looked at Selene. He looked at me.

"Selene is trying to help," he said. "Lyra, you've had a shock. Go back to your room."

"I am your mate."

"You are no one," he said.

The floor seemed to drop away beneath me.

It was not the words. It was how quietly he said them. As if they were the most ordinary words in the world. As if every bone in my body did not carry his name.

Something in me tore loose. The bond throbbed in my chest, and I felt every night I had waited for him. Every wound I had stitched while he took the credit. Every lie I had swallowed because I thought love meant making myself small.

And beneath all that, something old and silver stirred awake.

My hand moved on its own. I ripped off the leather cuff. The mate mark lay black and ugly on my wrist, and it pulsed like a second heartbeat. I jammed my thumbnail into it.

"By the light of the Moon Goddess," I said, in a voice I did not recognize, "I cut this thread. I refuse this bond."

"Lyra, don't…" Kael lunged.

The mark split open.

Pain tore through me, like pulling a root out of my chest with the dirt still clinging to it. I dropped to my knees and screamed. Silver light blasted out of my wrist, pale and cold as moonlight on water. The cellar lamps burst one after another. Glass sprayed across the floor. The steel table rang like a struck bell, and every strap holding my father snapped open at once.

I heard Kael roar my name. I heard his body hit the stone.

Then it was over, and the place where the bond had been felt clean and hollow and terrible.

I stood. My knees were bleeding. Selene was plastered against the wall, her face white as her coat. Kael was on his hands and knees, gasping like a man who had been stabbed.

I did not look at him. I hauled my father off the table, light as a child in my arms, and climbed the forty-one steps.

In the courtyard, the moon hung over the keep. As I crossed the packed snow, its edges began to turn silver, then brighter, then so bright it threw hard shadows from the well. Every wolf in Draven Keep woke howling. Windows cracked. Horses screamed in the stables. Someone on the wall shouted, "The Alpha's bond has snapped!"

Nobody had known he had one.

Guards met me at the gate with spears lowered. Selene's voice rang from the keep steps behind me, cold and steady. "Take their cart. Take their horses. Let her go."

So they let me go.

I laid my father on a firewood sled and dragged it out of Draven territory into the dark. The gates thundered shut behind me. Far away inside the hall, a man's voice broke on a single word.

"Lyra!"

I kept walking.

The sled runners hissed over the snow. My father's lips moved against my shoulder, and I bent close to hear him.

"They were only practicing on me, Lyra," he breathed. "It's you they want."