جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

Lyra POVThe first blood moon rose on a Thursday. I knew because Thursdays were when they changed the kitchen roster, which meant I spent the whole day scrubbing the cold storage room instead of the main kitchen, alone, on my knees, with nothing but a bucket of grey water and the smell of old meat and my own thoughts for company.That was a bad combination.By the time they let me out it was past dark and my back had locked up somewhere around the fifth hour and my hands had stopped feeling like my hands and started feeling like two numb, useless things attached to the ends of my arms by mistake. I was carrying my bucket back through the servants' corridor when I felt it.It hit me the way it had never done before, it was not gradually, not gently, but all at once, like a door blowing open in a storm. My wolf lurched awake in my chest so violently I stumbled, grabbing the wall with one hand, the bucket clanging against the stone floor.She'd been silent for three days. Since Elena was

Lyra POVI almost didn't go.I stood at the bottom of the tower stairs for a full minute, the cup in my hand, Marcus's voice still crawling through my head, two more doses, two more doses, and told myself I was going up there because it was the smart thing to do. The strategic thing. The thing that kept me alive and kept Marcus from getting what he wanted and kept the three survivors in the dungeons from spending the rest of their lives in the dark.I was not going up there because of a dream.I was not going up there because some stupid broken part of me had spent every gray grinding day in this Keep watching a monster and somehow, somewhere in the surviving of him, had started to find the man underneath. I was not going because of the way he'd said my name in the courtyard, quietly, just for me, or the way he'd looked at me when things got too honest and he'd reached for cruelty the way other people reach for something familiar when they're scared.I was going because of Marcus.Tha

Dante POVI hadn't planned to go to the east sitting room.I'd been on my way to the war room, a meeting with my head warrior about the Stoneclaw border, something that had been on my schedule since yesterday and had nothing to do with slaves or breakfast trays or the particular wrongness that had been sitting in my chest since I woke up and found that the girl hadn't come.But I passed the corridor.And something stopped me.Not a sound. Not a smell. Just that instinct — the one that had kept me alive longer than skill alone could account for — planting its feet and refusing to move me forward until I paid attention to whatever it was pulling me toward.I turned down the corridor.Stopped outside the east sitting room.Listened.Silence. The specific texture of it that a room holds when people inside it are being very careful not to make noise.I opened the door.The scene arranged itself in one second.Marcus at the window. Lyra at the door, close enough that she had to step back wh

The question was so unexpected that I answered it before I'd decided to."Eighteen," I said. "Today."The silence that followed was enormous.Dante looked at me. I looked at Dante. My wolf had stopped making the sound and had gone completely, unnervingly quiet in the center of my chest, the way she went quiet when something was so significant that even she didn't know what to do with it."Say that again," he said."I turned eighteen today," I said. And then, because the look on his face was doing something to my ability to maintain the performance of nothing "Why does that—""When did it start," he said. "This morning. Then..." He stopped. His jaw tightened. "What you're feeling right now. When did it start."I stared at him."You feel it too," I said.It wasn't a question.He looked at me for a long moment with those green eyes that were doing something completely uncontrolled and completely unlike anything I'd seen from him in all the weeks I'd been in this Keep. Something that look

Lyra POVThe first thing I noticed was that people looked at me differently.Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just that, eyes that used to slide off me started catching and holding for half a second longer than they should. Kitchen workers who hadn't spoken a word to me in weeks suddenly found reasons to be wherever I was. Guards who had been walking past me for months without acknowledgment started stepping aside when I came down a corridor.It took me half a day to understand why.The collar was gone.I'd been so focused on what its absence felt like from the inside, the space my wolf now occupied, the strange lightness of my own throat, the way I kept reaching up to touch the place where the silver used to sit and finding nothing — that I hadn't thought about what it looked like from the outside.Someone had made a decision about me.The Alpha had made a decision about me.By evening the whole Keep knew. I could feel it moving through the building the way rumors moved, room to ro