Chapter 51: What The Cold Carries

StilesThe cold hit like a wall the second the door shut behind me, but it was the scent that stopped me on the porch steps — old blood, and under it, something sour and diseased that didn't belong to any wolf I'd ever tracked.Wererats. Again, or still. I hadn't decided yet whether it was the same pack that had gone after Liora two nights ago, working their way back along her trail, or a second group drawn in by whatever had drawn the first — the baby's scent, maybe, or hers, sweetened now by fever and Alpha pheromones she had no idea how to mask.I counted four shapes moving along the tree line. They weren’t attacking. They were simply watching.That was worse.I'd killed wererats before. Ugly work, really… they didn't die like proper wolves, didn't have the decency to go down clean, they just kept coming on broken legs until you took the head off. Four of them wasn't a fight I loved my odds in, not alone, not with a fevered woman and an infant locked in the one building I couldn't a

Chapter 52: What The Cold Carries

LioraThree days.That was how long it took the fever to break, according to Brenna, who announced this the way she announced everything else in her domain –without asking whether anyone wanted to hear it, and while stirring something that smelled like burnt sage and old socks over the cookfire."Three days is fast, for Alpha sickness," she said, not looking up from her pot. "We had a woman here two winters back, took her three weeks to stop trying to claw her way north. You're either stronger than you look, or that bond of yours isn't as deep as it thinks it is.""It's deep," I said, before I could stop myself.Brenna's eyebrows went up. She was somewhere past sixty, built like a woman who'd spent those sixty years doing things that would have killed a softer person, with a long grey braid and hands scarred from what I was fairly sure was both cooking fires and combat. She'd looked at me exactly once, the morning after the fever broke, sniffed hard enough to make her opinion known, a

Chapter 53: Debts

StilesGideon found me at the wood pile, which meant he'd been watching the cabin long enough to know I'd be there, which meant this conversation had been coming since the morning Liora's fever broke and half of Whitewaters started whispering about the woman with royal blood on her skin.He'd built this valley out of nothing but debts and dead ends fifteen years before I ever found my way here, back when I was still a boy with a Vanguard scar I hadn't earned honestly and nowhere else that would take me. Gideon was pushing sixty now, silver through what was left of his beard, a limp in the left leg that only showed when he was tired, and not one soul in Whitewaters had ever seen him raise his voice. He didn't need to. Men who'd survived what Gideon had survived rarely did."Heard you've got a guest," Gideon said. No greeting. Gideon didn't believe in wasting words on things that weren't information."Heard right." I split another log, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands t

Chapter 54: Stakes

LioraThe candle flame bent sideways.I almost missed it. I was half-watching Mael where he lay on the fur rug, half-listening to Wren narrate an elaborate story about a fox she'd apparently befriended over the summer, and the candle on the shelf behind them guttered like a draft had caught it. Except there was no draft. The shutters were latched. The fire in the hearth burned straight and undisturbed six feet away.The flame bent toward Mael. Held there, a slow curve of gold leaning like a compass needle finding north, for three full seconds, before it snapped back upright like nothing had happened at all. Strange.I told myself it was the fire settling. I told myself the same thing two days later when I found every dead leaf in a wide, unnatural ring around his basket had gone soft and green again, as if autumn had reversed itself in a two-foot circle and nowhere else. I told myself a great many convenient things, that week, because the alternative was sitting with what Maren had s

Chapter 55: Static

"Do you love him?"Stiles asked it plain, like something he's been sitting on for days and finally can't hold anymore.The question landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there. Out past the porch rail, the valley lay under a thin coat of new snow, silver-blue and empty, and I found myself grateful for something to look at that wasn't his face while I worked out whether I actually had an answer."I.. I don't know." It was easier to say out loud in the dark, to someone who wasn't asking to hurt me with it. "My wolf, that's not a question. What she feels for him is just there, all the time, like a second heartbeat I never agreed to grow. Whether the rest of me loves him. The part that isn't wolf at all. I haven't had time to find out. Everything's been survival since the day I met him.""That's not really an answer.""I know." I pulled my knees up under Mael's weight, tucking the blanket tighter around him without needing to look. "What about you. You ever love anyone, before all thi

Chapter 56: Rebound

"Don't stop."He didn't. His hand slid up under the hem of my borrowed shirt, his palm rough and warm against my ribs, and slowly sliding up my breasts… My fingers found his hair, his collar, the laces at his throat, pulling him closer, greedy for more of him. I could feel his cock already getting hard against his pants. And oh how wet I was too. If it weren’t for the cold, I would’ve been wet the very day i laid eyes on him too. He was beautiful! He is beautiful! “Oh, Liora, fuck! You are delivious!” He groaned against my skin when I arched into him. The sound went straight through me."This alright?" he asked, mouth still at my throat, voice wrecked."If you stop asking, it will be."A huff of laughter, breathless, against my collarbone, and then his teeth grazed the same spot, gentle enough to ask, hard enough to make my knees forget their job. I could feel slick pooling down my thighs. I couldn’t help it… Oh goddess I couldn’t My shirt came loose from where I'd tucked it, his

Chapter 57: Tracks In The Snow

StilesThree days, and neither of us said one word about what happened on that porch step. It might have been the loudest silence I've ever lived inside of.I caught myself watching her mouth when she talked to Wren about nothing in particular. I caught myself remembering, at completely useless moments, hauling water, splitting wood, standing watch at two in the morning, the exact sound she'd made against my throat right before her wolf put her on the ground. I didn't know what to do with any of it, so I did what I always do with things I don't know what to do with. I worked. I watched the tree line. I let Gideon's frost-thaw deadline sit on my chest like a stone and told myself that was the thing keeping me up nights, when both of us knew better.Liora didn't bring it up either. If anything she'd gone quieter around me, not cold exactly, just careful, like when a person gets careful around a wound they aren't ready to look at directly. Once, reaching past me for the kettle, her hand

Chapter 58

StilesThree days, and neither of us said one word about what happened on that porch step. It might have been the loudest silence I've ever lived inside of.I caught myself watching her mouth when she talked to Wren about nothing in particular. I caught myself remembering, at completely useless moments, hauling water, splitting wood, standing watch at two in the morning, the exact sound she'd made against my throat right before her wolf put her on the ground. I didn't know what to do with any of it, so I did what I always do with things I don't know what to do with. I worked. I watched the tree line. I let Gideon's frost-thaw deadline sit on my chest like a stone and told myself that was the thing keeping me up nights, when both of us knew better.Liora didn't bring it up either. If anything she'd gone quieter around me, not cold exactly, just careful, like when a person gets careful around a wound they aren't ready to look at directly. Once, reaching past me for the kettle, her hand

All Chapters of My Ex Sold Me To The Devil: Chapter 51 - Chapter 58

Chapter 51: What The Cold Carries

Chapter 52: What The Cold Carries

Chapter 53: Debts

Chapter 54: Stakes

Chapter 55: Static

Chapter 56: Rebound

Chapter 57: Tracks In The Snow

Chapter 58