My Ex Sold Me To The Devil のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 131 - チャプター 140

The house sat alone past the last of the village, where the trees drew in close and the snow lay unbroken, and I knew it before Dain lifted a hand to point, because the cold around it was wrong.I felt it before I saw it. The air for twenty paces around that door was colder than air has any right to be, a dead still chill with no wind in it, and the snow lay smooth and untrodden all the way to the step, as if even the deer had learned to go the long way round. One window held a light. Not firelight. A soft steady glow, blue at the edges, that never once flickered.“I’ll wait here,” Dain said, and would come no nearer, and I didn’t blame him.I had stood at this door once before. I was fourteen, and my father had me by the collar, and he shoved me through it and made me watch and told me to learn to love what he called the old art. The deep art. The thing that keeps a bloodline strong when the blood runs thin. I hadn’t understood it then. I understood it now, and that was its own kind

KaelenI got back to the inn past the deepest hour. The door was barred from the inside, and when I knocked there was no answer.I knocked again. Nothing. The old cold suspicion came up in me at once, because that is what she has made of me these last weeks, a man who hears a silence and reaches straight for betrayal. I put my shoulder to the wood and listened. No child. No breath. No sound of anyone moving. My blood went to ice. Gone. She was gone, the boy with her, and I’d known better than to trust a woman the King knew by name, a woman the soldier had known, a woman every man I crossed seemed to hold some claim on but me.“Selena.” I said it to the dark of the stair. Then louder, past caring who woke. “Selena.”“Relax, my Alpha.”Her voice came from below me, at the foot of the stair. I turned and there she was, climbing up out of the dark with snow on her cloak and the child a sleeping weight in her arms, calm as a holy day, one brow lifting at the state of me.“I took him out fo

SelenaOf course he is human. Poor Kaelen. This is not your Mael.You should have seen his face. I almost felt for him, kneeling there with the ram’s blood crusting on his chest and his whole life’s hope curdling in the air in front of him, staring at a baby he’d dragged across a continent to butcher and being told it was worth exactly nothing. Almost. I have a great deal of practice at almost.“Stop this!” His voice came out cracked. “Whatever this is. If this is a joke, old man, some trick, you stop it now.”“A joke?” Ilvane turned his blind face on him, and he was angry, the real trembling fury of a spiritual man made a fool of in his own rite. “Do the gods look like clowns to you, Alpha? Does the Mother of the long dark juggle for your pleasure? My nose has not had a moment’s peace since you walked in reeking of human flesh. I left my house and my quiet to come to you, and you made me kneel over a mewling human infant and chant her sacred words at it, and when she asks me why her

“Cloak up, all of you. We go careful, off the main ways, and we do not let one living soul see this face between here and the low town. We finish it tonight. I am done waiting on it.”Kaelen turned to Dain and jerked his chin at the body. “Get rid of that. The head too. Bury it, burn it, I don’t care which, only put it somewhere the thaw won’t hand back.”“Or,” I said.They all looked at me.“Why throw away a respected man’s head,” I said, “while there’s a use still left in it?” I kept my eyes on Kaelen. “This new hollower will run hotter than the last. Younger. Prouder. He may take one look at an Alpha with a stolen pup and decide his conscience, or his King, is worth more to him than your coin. So you take the choice off him before he has it.” I nodded down at the head on the floor. “You set the head of the only other hollower in the north on his table. You say nothing at all. And you let him understand, all on his own, what disobedience costs in this trade now. His silence will fee

LioraWe stopped early that night. The wind had died down and there was wood for a fire, so the men made camp in a hollow out of the weather.Riven was cooking a rabbit. He was bad at it. He kept turning it the wrong way, so one side burned and the other stayed raw. Stiles sat across the fire and watched him do it and did not say a word, which was worse than if he had.I almost smiled. For a moment it felt normal. Three people and a fire and a bit of food. I had not felt normal in a long time.Then one of Riven’s men came up the slope and went down on one knee by the King.“We’ve found the road, Alpha,” he said. “If we ride hard at first light, we reach Ironclaw by tomorrow night.”The fire kept crackling. Nobody said anything.Tomorrow. My son was in that place. Tomorrow I would stand at the gates of the house that was holding him, and I did not know if I would find him alive, or what Kaelen had done to him, or if I was already too late. My hands started to shake. I pushed them betwe