Semua Bab Alpha's Rejection, Double Revenge: Bab 11 - Bab 15

It arrives on a Tuesday.I know it's coming before Marcus brings it, because I've seen the seal twice already on his desk and the third time a thing appears in front of you it's no longer a coincidence, it's a decision someone else is making about when to tell you.So I'm not surprised when he appears in the doorway of the training room where I'm working through forms alone in the early light, a cream envelope in his hand and the expression of a man who has been rehearsing this for at least an hour.I lower my arms."How long have you had it?" I ask.Marcus has the grace not to pretend. "Four days.""Did Kade ask you to hold it?"A pause that is itself an answer. "He wanted to find the right time.""There isn't one." I cross to him and take the envelope.The council seal is pressed deep into red wax, the same seal I've been looking at on pack documents since I was old enough to read them. The stylized wolf head. The crossed pine branches. The motto in the old tongue that translates, r

Ashwood at night is a different creature to Blackridge, softer air, the smell of pine and river water, the distant sound of the copper-dark current moving through the valley below. Beautiful, if you're in the right frame of mind for it.I'm not.I walk three steps down the path from the door and stop and turn, because I can feel him behind me and I'm not interested in being followed into the dark without at least facing in his direction. Kade stops two feet away.He looks… terrible, actually. Not in the way Theron meant this morning. Kade looks like a man who has been running on adrenaline and control and very little else, and has just reached the point where the adrenaline is still there but the control is fraying at the edges. His hair is wrong. His jacket isn't his riding one, it's the heavier one, the one he grabs when he leaves fast without thinking, which means he left fast without thinking.He found out I was gone and he came, the thought does something I don't have a name for,

He's waiting with both horses at Theron's gate.He's untethered mine from the post where I left her and is standing between both animals in the dark with his hand on her neck and his eyes on the tree line, and there's something in the picture of it, the easy and unconscious patience of it that catches in my chest before I can stop it.I walk past him and take her reins without comment.We ride out in silence.The Ashwood forest is different to Blackridge's at night, the trees are broader here, the canopy lower, filtering the moonlight into something diffuse and silver. Our horses' hooves are quiet on the pine-needle ground. Neither of us speaks, which should feel tense and mostly just feels inevitable.It takes twenty minutes before the rain starts.The sky opens its cold borders and within thirty seconds we're both soaked through."There's a shelter," Kade says, the first words either of us has spoken since the gate. "Maintenance cabin, half a mile northeast. We used it for the easte