Chapter eleven

Silverpine — Lord Silas Corvain

The cell was empty.

Corvain stood in the doorway with his coat still buttoned against the dungeon chill and looked at the abandoned ropes on the floor, the cot dragged beneath the window, the gap in the bars with its edges scraped bright and smeared brown where she’d bled forcing herself through.

Behind him, the guards had gone the color of old tallow. Somewhere up the spiral stairs, he could hear Alpha Dayn shouting at someone, the words lost, the fury clear.

Corvain crouched. He picked up a frayed loop of rope, turned it in his gloved fingers, examined the fibers where she’d sawed through it against raw stone. Twenty minutes of work, he judged. Perhaps thirty. With bound hands, in the cold, after a beating and a rejection and an auction.

He smiled.

“Sir,” the auction house steward said nervously, “the pack extends its deepest apologies. Naturally your payment will be returned in full—”

“Keep it.”

The steward blinked. “Sir?”

“Keep the payment. Consider it a deposit.” Corvain rose, brushing dust from his knee, and looked up at the little window and its missing bar. Ten thousand had bought him a pretty, broken thing to use up. This — this was becoming something else entirely. Any Omega could kneel. He had cellars full of ones that knelt. But one that bled herself free and went through a stone gap into the wild night, starved and alone?

Runners were rare. Runners were fun.

“She’ll have gone to ground,” he said, thinking aloud. “Not the wilds — she’d know she wouldn’t last. Which means a border. Which means someone she trusts.” He glanced at the steward. “The Adair girl’s file. Friends, schoolmates, anyone who ever passed her a kind word. I want it by tonight.”

“The Alpha has already dispatched trackers, my lord—”

“The Alpha’s trackers hunt for his pride.” Corvain pulled his gloves tighter. “Mine hunt for me. There’s a difference in motivation. Send word to my man Vance; tell him to bring the hounds.”

He climbed the spiral stairs into the grey afternoon, and found Dayn Blackwood waiting in the courtyard, jaw tight, a muscle ticking beneath his eye.

“Lord Corvain. You have my personal guarantee she’ll be recovered—”

“I don’t want your guarantee. I want the border crossing logs for the last two nights, and then I want to be left alone.” Corvain studied the younger Alpha with mild, unhurried interest. “Curious thing, though. You don’t smell angry, Blackwood. Your face is doing all the correct things, but underneath it—” he inhaled once, delicately, “—you smell relieved.”

Dayn went very still. “Careful.”

“Always.” Corvain smiled his nightmare smile and walked to his car.

Dayn

He stood in the courtyard long after Corvain’s car had passed the gates, and hated him, and hated more that the man was right.

Relieved. It sat in his chest like something swallowed wrong. He should be incandescent. She had humiliated him twice now — once by existing, once by escaping — and the pack was whispering, and his mother was raging, and the ten thousand sat in the treasury like a stone he couldn’t stop touching.

And underneath all of it, when the guard had come running with the words the cell is empty, the first thing he’d felt — before the anger arrived to bury it — was the loosening of something around his throat.

His wolf had not spoken to him since the ballroom.

Not sulked. Not raged. Silence, total and unnatural, like a room where someone has stopped breathing. Eight days now. He’d told himself it was the broken bond settling. Bonds took time to die, everyone knew that. It meant nothing that the silence had teeth. It meant nothing that last night, at dinner, his mother had raised a toast to “putting the murderer behind us” and his hand had cracked the stem of the glass without his permission.

“Alpha.” His Beta approached, careful as a man nearing a cliff edge. “The trackers report. Her trail runs north through the preserve. It ends at the lake.”

“Ends.”

“She crossed the water, Alpha. And the far shore is—” The Beta hesitated.

“I know what the far shore is.” The Alpha King’s territory. Neutral ground, crawling with royal patrols, governed by a man whose laws on the treatment of pack members Dayn had personally, spectacularly, and provably broken eight days ago.

If she talked — if anyone with a crown’s authority ever heard the words auction and Omega from her mouth—

“Recall our trackers,” Dayn said. “We don’t cross that border. Not for her.”

“And Lord Corvain’s men? They won’t stop at a lake.”

Dayn looked north, past the walls, toward water he couldn’t see. Somewhere beyond it, the woman the Goddess had chained him to was running through a kingdom where his word meant nothing, carrying enough truth to burn him to the ground, hunted by a man whose appetites were the subject of stories even Alphas told quietly.

The silence in his chest where his wolf used to live said nothing at all.

“Corvain’s men are Corvain’s problem,” he said. “Whatever happens to her over there — it never touches Silverpine. See to it.”

He walked back inside, and did not ask himself why, at the words whatever happens to her, his hand had curled into a fist.