Chapter 2: False accusations

They kept me in the old grain cellar beneath the west tower, the room the pack used for wolves who lost control during a full moon and needed somewhere to wait it out. Stone walls three feet thick. A door with an iron bar on the outside, not the inside. I sat on the cold floor and pressed my palm flat against my chest, right over the place the bond had hooked into me, and it still ached even now, hours later, a phantom thread stretched too tight and pulled toward wherever Damon was.

I didn't know how long I'd been down there when the bar finally scraped back.

It wasn't Damon. It was Elder Cole, flanked by two warriors, and behind him, hanging back in the doorway like she wanted witnesses to remember she hadn't wanted to come, was Vivienne.

"Sit up," Elder Cole said. "The council wants answers before the sun sets."

I stood instead, because I refused to answer him from the floor. "I don't have answers. I don't know what you think I've done."

"Convenient." He circled me slowly, the way you'd circle livestock you were deciding whether to slaughter it. "Eight months ago three of our scouts went missing on the eastern ridge, the same week you arrived at our border half starved and claiming you remembered nothing. Crimson Hollow has wanted a way inside Ashwood's walls for a generation. What better way than a girl the Moon Goddess herself seems to have handed our Alpha?"

"The bond doesn't choose sides in a war," I said. "It doesn't choose anything. It just happens."

"Or it's engineered." Vivienne finally spoke from the doorway, soft, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if she'd shouted. "There are old rites. Blood magic that can force a false bond, if you know the right herbs and the right words spoken under the right moon. Crimson Hollow's witches have used them before."

"That's not real," I said, though I had no way to know if it was or wasn't. I had grown up knowing almost nothing about my own kind's dark histories.

"Isn't it?" Vivienne stepped fully into the cellar now, and I saw she was holding something, a small leather pouch, the kind used to carry dried herbs for exactly the sort of rite she'd just described. "This was found in the servants' quarters. Under your mattress."

My stomach dropped. "I've never seen that before in my life."

"That's what they all say." Elder Cole's voice had gone flat and final in a way that frightened me more than his anger had. "Blood ash. Wolfsbane root ground fine enough to hide in tea. Crimson thread pulled from a ceremonial binding cloth. Someone in this manor has been planning this for months, and it wasn't me, and it certainly wasn't my daughter, who has done nothing but wait faithfully for a wedding that was stolen from her tonight."

I looked past him at Vivienne, and for one unguarded second, before she remembered to arrange her face into something sorrowful, I caught it again. That flicker. Not grief. Satisfaction, sharp and bright, gone the instant she noticed me watching.

She had planted it. I was as certain of that as I had ever been certain of anything, and I had no way in the world to prove it.

"Ask the guards who searched my quarters," I said, keeping my voice steady through sheer force of will. "Ask who let them in. Ask who's had access to that room besides me."

"You're accusing Lady Vivienne of planting evidence against herself?" One of the warriors actually laughed, short and disbelieving. "The girl has some nerve."

"I'm not accusing anyone of anything," I said. "I'm asking you to look instead of deciding."

Elder Cole waved a hand like he was swatting away a fly. "The council convenes at dusk. You will stand before them and answer for the pouch, for your unknown origins, for the timing of your arrival, and for whatever hold you've placed on our Alpha. If the Moon Goddess truly chose you, she will protect you there. If not..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

They left me alone again, the bar scraping back into place, and I sat with my back against the cold stone and tried to slow my breathing.

The bond in my chest pulled harder as the hours passed, and somewhere close to sunset I felt something shift in it, a spike of pain that wasn't mine, sharp enough to make me gasp out loud. Damon. Something had happened to Damon, or he was fighting something, arguing with someone, I couldn't tell which, only that the thread connecting us had gone taut and trembling like a bowstring pulled to its limit.

The door opened again before I could catch my breath. Not Elder Cole this time. A servant girl I didn't recognize, young, terrified, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds like she expected to be caught.

"I don't have long at all," she whispered, crouching low beside me. "I clean Lady Vivienne's chambers. I saw her write something two nights ago, before any of this happened. A letter. She burned most of it, but I kept a piece from the hearth before the ashes went cold."

She pressed a scrap of scorched paper into my shaking hand, no bigger than my palm, most of it blackened beyond reading now. But three words had survived along the torn edge, written in handwriting I recognized instantly from a dozen supply requisitions Vivienne had signed over the last several months.

*...before the ceremony...*

My blood went cold. Whatever Vivienne had planned, she had been planning it before I ever collapsed in that hall, before the bond had even snapped into place.

Which meant she had known, somehow, long before that night, that the bond was going to happen. And she had already been preparing, quietly and carefully, to bury me under it the moment it did.