Semua Bab My Ex Sold Me To The Devil: Bab 91 - Bab 100

They buried Brenna in the grey light of the morning after, in ground so frozen it took four men half the night to open it.I stood at the edge of the grave while they worked and I understood, finally, what Gideon had been trying to tell me since the first week. All of it. Every word. They had told me plainly. We can hide you, but we cannot protect you, not from what hunts you, not when it comes in force. And I had heard them and I had stayed anyway, because I was tired and she was warm and Wren made my son laugh and I wanted, so badly, to believe I'd found a place.I should have gone. Goddess forgive me, I should have taken Mael and walked back into the snow the very first night and kept walking. These people asked for nothing but to be left alone at the edge of the world, to survive in quiet, and I brought Frostbane down on them. I brought the fire. Every body they lowered into the ground that morning was in the ground because of me.And Brenna. Brenna, who fed everyone who came here

I finished settling the furs on my shoulders and I walked out into the grey morning, and I will tell you plainly that I already knew, in the animal part of me, that whatever waited out there was meant to break me.My camp was up and ready for the day. The horses stood saddled, the men armed and formed, the whole disciplined machine of a King's hunting party waiting on my word to move. And there in the middle of it, in a cleared space in the trodden snow, sat a crate.A large one. Bound in iron, sealed, and stamped into the wood on its lid, the clawed sigil of Frostbane."Who brought this." I made my voice quiet, which is worse than making it loud, and every man there knew it. "Who carried a Frostbane crate into the middle of my camp in the dark and walked back out again?”Silence."We woke to it, Sire," Corin said, low, at my shoulder. "The watch saw nothing. It was simply here at first light."The rage came up so fast and so cold it frightened even me. "It was simply here??!!" I turn

Author’s POVEight years ago.The man kneels in the dirt of a Valrok smallholding and takes both his daughters' hands in his, and he weeps. He is free. They are free. Through all the long years of it he never once let himself believe he would live to see this day, and now it is here, and his old body cannot hold the weight of it any other way."Look at you," he says. He is thin, and worn, older than his years, the way slavery ages a man from the inside out. But his eyes are bright as a boy's. "Look at the both of you. Grown. Free. Standing on ground no man owns." He kisses the elder girl's forehead, and holds her face in his rough hands, and Selena, twenty-three and already carrying more than he will ever know, makes herself smile for him. "You did this, my heart. Your old father knows what it cost. Not the coin. I know there was more than coin. You've never said, and I've never asked, and I never will. But I know. And there is no man in all the Goddess's world prouder of his daughte

LioraThe wolfsbane took four days to fully leave me.I felt it go the way you feel a fever break, the fog thinning hour by hour, my wolf surfacing back up out of the sick heavy dark Selena's arrows had pushed her into. By the fourth morning I could stand without the world tilting. By the fifth I could walk the length of the valley without needing to stop and breathe. My body was mending. Whitewaters was mending too, in its slow grieving way, the graves settling, the burned cabins being pulled down and cleared, the living moving through their days quieter than before and closer together.Stiles healed faster than any of us. His wolf did most of it in the first two days, knitting the hole in his chest closed from the inside out, and by the fifth he was on his feet for real, moving stiff but sure, the grey gone out of his face. He came and found me most mornings. Sat with me. Didn't push, didn't ask for anything, just stayed close in that quiet steady way of his, and I let him, because

LioraThe bond nearly took my legs out from under me.The moment his eyes found mine it went taut, that pull I'd felt for two days dragging north, and now it had a face and the face was his and every cell in my body wanted to cross that snow and close the distance. My wolf came up howling. ‘Go to him. Go, go, he's here, he's finally here.’ My feet actually shifted in the snow before I caught them.I planted them. I made myself stand. Because standing across from me was the man who put me on that throne-room floor. The man who let a room full of Alphas watch him call me unfit. The man whose mark on my skin was the whole reason Kaelen had a bounty to chase, the whole reason Brenna was in the ground and my son was somewhere south in the arms of a monster. The bond wanted him. I made myself remember what the bond had cost me."So you're not dead," Riven said.He came down off his horse. He did it slow, and the whole kneeling valley flinched as one when his boots hit the snow, and he cro