Todos os capítulos de Marked By My Enemy: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 8

Varek Rhoswyn had not slept through a single fifth of Ashfall in five years, and tonight wasn't going to be the exception.He stood at the window of his tower room with a glass he hadn't touched, watching the last light burn out over the eastern ridge. The same ridge his father had ordered him to cross five years ago, with a raiding party and a task he still hadn't forgiven himself for finishing. He could still feel the weight of Emeric Vaelkarn going slack beneath his claws. The exact moment he'd known there was no taking it back.On the fifth of Ashfall the wolf in him never rested. It paced the inside of his ribs until dawn, and he let it. It was the only mourner Emeric Vaelkarn had ever had from House Rhoswyn.A knock. He didn't turn."Come in."Garrow's scent reached him first, leather and old smoke and the sourness of a wolf who hadn't slept either. Then Garrow let himself in and skipped the pleasantries. "Your father wants you. Now, not after you've finished brooding at the win

The wolf in Varek hadn't settled since the chamber, and pacing the length of his assigned room for the better part of an hour hadn't helped. It kept scenting the air for snow and cold iron and a thread of heat underneath. Her scent. It had been in his nose since the courtyard, and he could not scrub it out.He kept seeing her exactly as she'd looked across that table: pale gold hair dragged back in a braid so hard it looked like a weapon, blue eyes gone cold as glacier ice the second she recognized him, fists already curling like she wanted to put one through his teeth. He hated that some helpless part of his body had wanted to close the distance anyway, bond or no bond, hatred be damned. He still didn't know what he'd been thinking when he growled at that guard. He knew exactly. The wolf had thought it, and he had only been the mouth.He'd been given quarters on the third floor of Cairnhold's guest wing, stone walls, a narrow window, a bed he had no intention of using tonight. What h

Varek was already moving before the second toll of the alarm finished ringing, the wolf surging up under his skin so fast the seams of his shirt tore at the shoulder.Senna didn't slow him down. She was already three steps ahead of him in the corridor, bare feet silent on stone, and neither of them said a word about the fact that they were running toward the danger together instead of away from each other in opposite directions like sense would have suggested.The stairwell emptied into a knot of Council staff running the other way, robes and lanterns and one elder shouting orders nobody was listening to. Varek shouldered past without slowing. Somewhere below them another window went, glass raining down three floors in a sound like ice breaking on a lake. He caught Senna's arm once, on the last landing, when she nearly went down over someone's dropped lantern, and neither of them said anything about how naturally his hand found her elbow before either of them had decided to let it.Th

The cold room under the Council wing smelled like a lake in winter.Varek stood among the slabs with his breath smoking in front of him. The cellar had been cut into the root of the mountain, a vaulted tunnel of black stone where Cairnhold kept its dead until their Houses came to collect them. Four slabs. Four sheets, stiff with rime. An orderly slept upright on a stool by the door, chin on his chest.Nobody had told Varek to come here. Nobody had told him not to. He had walked out of the Archive Room, passed the stair to his own bed and kept going down.He lifted the nearest sheet.The boy under it had freckles. They stood out like spilled pepper against skin gone the color of tallow. A bolt had taken him high in the shoulder. From the wound, ice had spread across the chest in fine branching lines, as if someone had pressed a frozen river against his ribs and let it set. His hands lay open at his sides.Joren Reeve. Nineteen.Varek had been nineteen on the eastern ridge. He had stopp