Semua Bab Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy: Bab 131 - Bab 140

HaydeeSomething was wrong with Tara-Lee, and it had nothing to do with the chains.She led us down through the black arteries of the dead city exactly as promised, calling out the rotten stairs, steering us around the pits, earning her life step by step. But somewhere in the deep tunnels her voice had gone thin and distracted, and twice I watched her stop mid-stride for no reason I could see, her head tilting as though she were listening to something the rest of us could not hear.She covered it badly.A woman who had spent her life performing every expression on her face could not, tonight, keep it still, and I did not know why, and I was too fixed on the compass burning toward my father to spend much thought on it.Cole spent thought on it.He had been watching her the whole descent, the man who understood cruelty from the inside watching the woman who had perfected it, and near the bottom of a long stair he said

HaydeeIt took me a moment to understand what my father was really saying, and when I did, the floor of the world dropped out from under me."You," I said. "You mean you. When you say someone of our blood has to die, you are not describing a problem. You are volunteering.""I have been volunteering for eighteen years," Tristan said, and his calm was the worst thing in that gallery of horrors. "I am the anchor, already here, already sealed to it, already at the end of a life that stopped being mine the night this city fell. If a Moongale has to die for the crown to pass, let it be the one who is old and caged and finished, not the young queen the north needs or the baby up in the tower. I am the obvious answer, Talitha. I have had a very long time to grow comfortable with being the obvious answer."He said it the way another man might offer to carry a heavy box. No drama, no plea, a solution proposed by a man who had made his peac

HaydeeI stopped running, because there was nowhere left to run to.Selene was gone from the camp above, and the news came down the stair to meet me on a runner's breathless voice. Ginni had thrown her body over my daughter and taken three blades doing it.She was alive, they thought she would stay alive. And she had bought Selene nothing, because Ursula had walked through the wards like they were painted on and lifted my child out of a wounded girl's arms and vanished.I came down the stairs shaking with all of it, and I found Tara-Lee where I had left her, on her knees in the dark, and she had not moved."I do not care," she said, before I reached her. She did not look up. Her voice had gone flat and hard, reaching for the old armor, her hands still pressed to her chest."Whatever you think you saw. Whatever you think that was. I do not care about the child. I never have. She was a tool and she is Ursula's tool no

HaydeeWe came up into a city with a noose around it.By the time we climbed out of the prison into the ruined heart of the first Moonborn city, the eclipse was ninety minutes off and Ursula's whole force had closed around us.I stood on a broken rampart and looked out, and it was worse than an army. It was three armies under one banner.The rejected, thousands of them, ringing the ruins in the dark, chanting her name.Behind them the altered wolves, reshaped with stolen Moonborn blood into something faster and hungrier than a natural wolf.And behind those, the loyal packs, the old houses that had thrown in with her when she promised them a world without the mess of choice.They filled the plain to the treeline. We had a few hundred, a ring of thousand-year-old walls, and each other, and that last part was the problem.Because when I turned to look at what I had to hold that wall with, I saw a coaliti

HaydeeI reached them together, Hunter and I, and we went down on our knees on either side of the dying man in the mud.The spear had gone deep, silver and poison both, the two things a wolf's body cannot heal on its own, and I knew the moment I saw it that it was a killing wound. Cole lay in the churned ground with the shaft standing out of his chest and his blood going dark and fast into the dirt, and he was smiling, which was the worst of it.He had aimed his whole body at that spear on purpose, and hit what he was aiming at, and he was glad.Hunter had his hands on the wound before I did, pressing hard around the shaft, trying to hold the blood in a body that had already decided to let it go. And I watched the strangest thing pass over his face. The man had spent this whole war circling Cole as a rival, hating him for what he had done to me on a floor and for the love he still held for me after. None of that was on his face n