Lahat ng Kabanata ng When I’m Gone, You Love: Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

Cedrick's POVHer desk was empty.I stood in the doorway of the office I'd created for her at the school and looked at the clean surface and the neatly stacked files and the pen sitting in its holder. Her scent was there but faded, hours old, the residue of someone who had been here yesterday and hadn't returned.I checked with the headmaster. He confirmed Beatrice hadn't come in that morning. No call, no message, no explanation. I asked if this had happened before. He said no. In three years, she had never missed a day.I went to her house.The front door was unlocked. The garden was quiet, the rocking horse sitting in the sun, the half-built fort standing in the corner with its crooked walls and its painted patches drying in the warm air. I walked inside and found the rooms empty. Her bag was gone. Elan's bed was unmade, the sheets pulled back, his wooden horse missing from the pillow where it always sat.A note lay on the kitchen table. Beatrice's handwriting, quick and uneven, wri

Beatrice's POVThey hung us from the ceiling.Iron chains looped through hooks in the stone overhead, pulling my arms above my head until my shoulders burned and my feet barely touched the floor. My wrists were raw from the rope Martin's men had used, and the chains bit into the damaged skin and opened the wounds fresh. Blood ran down my forearms and dripped from my elbows.Elan hung beside me. They had used thinner chains for him, looped around his small wrists, and his body dangled like a puppet with its strings cut. His wooden horse lay on the floor beneath him where it had fallen from his grip. He wasn't crying anymore. He had cried for the first hour, screaming for me, screaming for help, and then the screaming had stopped and what replaced it was a silence that frightened me more than any sound he could have made."Elan," I said. My voice was hoarse. "Baby, look at me."His head lifted. His dark eyes found mine, and they were glassy and distant and carried a pain no four-year-ol

Cedrick's POVA voice came from the far wall. Weak and broken, barely louder than a breath."Don't trust him."Neah. She had crawled halfway up the wall where I'd thrown her, her body crumpled against the stone, blood matting her hair to her face. Her eyes were open but unfocused, and her wolf flickered inside her with the fading pulse of a candle about to go out. She shouldn't have been conscious. The magic I'd hit her with should have kept her down for hours. But Neah had always been stubborn, and the same stubbornness that had made her my enemy for years was now pushing words through a mouth that could barely form them."He's scheming," Neah said. Her voice cracked and dropped. "Whatever he promised, he won't keep it. Martin never keeps his word. Don't let him..."Her head fell forward. Her eyes closed. The flicker went out.Beatrice was on the floor with our son pressed against her chest, and she was crying. Not the quiet tears I'd seen in carriages and hospital rooms, but the ope

Beatrice's POVHe shouldn't have been standing.The physicians had told him as much. Henry had told him. I had told him, that morning at his bedside, when he'd pushed the blankets aside and swung his legs off the bed with the slow, stubborn determination of a man who had decided that a three-month coma and a knife wound through his chest were not sufficient reasons to miss a court date.But Cedrick didn't listen to physicians or advisors or the woman who had spent ninety-one days holding his hand. He put on a suit that hung loose on his diminished frame, and he walked out of the hospital with Henry at his elbow and his wolf pressing forward to compensate for the body that couldn't yet carry its own weight, and he went to court.The courtroom was full. Every seat occupied, every aisle packed, the gallery overflowing with wolves and nobles and journalists who had traveled from across the kingdom to witness what was being called the most significant trial in a generation. My brother stoo

The words settled into the corridor. I stood in the afternoon light and let them sit on me, let them press down with their full weight, and I felt the last of my anger collapse into something worse.Understanding.I understood. For the first time, standing in that corridor with the blood seer's report on the window ledge and the medical records beside it, I understood why she had run. Why she had lied. Why she had hidden my son from me for three years and built a life on the other side of the kingdom and let another man hold the child I should have been holding.She was afraid of me. Not in the way wolves fear a stronger wolf, but in the deep, permanent way that a woman fears a man who has hurt her so many times that gentleness itself has become a warning sign, because every gentle moment in their history was followed by something cruel."If I were you," I said slowly, "I would have done the same thing."She looked at me."If I had been in your position, carrying a child, afraid of th