All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

The tunnel behind the spring was not on any map Padraig had drawn for us. It opened where the wall markings thickened, a low split in the stone that a human would have missed and a wolf could just squeeze through, and the four of us went through it one after another: Ronan first, still shaking with what he had done, then me on three legs, then Nessa, then one of Bran's rogues whose name I had never learned. Behind us the chamber had gone quiet in a way I did not trust. Soren and Lorcan had stopped speaking. That was worse than the shouting.The split opened into a round room, low ceilinged, with a basin in the centre and water running down the far wall in a thin constant line. The air smelled of wet stone and something older, like the inside of a church. Nessa found a lantern on a shelf and struck it, and the light showed us our own blood on the floor."I will stand the tunnel," the rogue said. "If they come at us from the chamber, you will hear me before you see me." She was gone bef

The guards came through the tunnel in a wedge, and we met them in the round room with the basin at our backs. There were six of them, not nine, and the rogue from Bran's band took the first two before any of us could move, and then Ronan was in among them and I was behind him with a length of broken stone in my hand because I had not had time to shift again. Nessa fought beside me. She was not a warrior, she had never been a warrior, but she had grown up in a fishing pack and she knew how to put her shoulder into a man and she did it twice, and both times it worked.Then the fighting stopped, because the men in the grey uniforms were not looking at us anymore. They were looking past us, at the split in the stone, and Lorcan was standing in it.He had come alone. That was the first thing I noticed. No escort, no Council writ, no tailored calm. His coat was missing and his black hair with the silver streak through it had come loose from where he kept it, and there was a long graze down

I woke in the pack house with a blanket over me and the smell of the sea coming through an open window.For a long while I did not move. There was a weight on my chest that had nothing to do with the wound in my side, and I lay still and took stock of it. The bond was gone. Where Ronan had been, in that place behind my ribs that I had grown used to, there was a hollow, smooth as a worn stone. My wolf was gone too. I reached for her the way I had reached for her all my life, and there was nothing but the reaching.I must have made a sound, because Nessa was at my bedside in a moment, her freckled face pinched with worry, and behind her came Padraig with his white beard and his blue eyes, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and took my wrist and held it."Three days," he said. "You have been asleep for three days, girl. The pack thought you were gone.""How is Ronan?"Padraig and Nessa looked at each other. It was Nessa who answered. "He has not left the corridor outside this door. H

The Elara business took three days and I will not spend much time on it here, because it turned out to be a good deal less dramatic than the name on the gate suggested. She was a thin, tired woman with a pinched mouth and brown hair going grey at the temples, and she stood in the Council chamber and told the elders everything about the proxy rite that had been worked on her and on Ronan, and when she had finished she asked permission to leave the island and never come back. Colm granted it. She was on the boat by evening.What matters is what she said before she went, when Ronan stopped her at the harbour wall.She looked at him for a long moment, and she said, "I was paid to be a name and a scent on a piece of paper. I did not know it was tied to your life until the trial. I am sorry for it."Ronan said, "You did not build it. He did.""No," she said. "But I took the money." And she got on the boat.That was the day his healing began.Padraig had told me it would be slow. The false b

The keeper's boat could wait until morning. That was what Ronan said, and I agreed with him, and we went up the hill to the pack house with the rain coming down soft and steady and Nessa trotting ahead of us complaining that nobody ever told her anything.The Alpha's quarters had been aired out and the fishing gear moved to the shed at the back, and the room smelled of beeswax and the sea. There was a fire already lit in the grate and a jug of water on the washstand and the wide bed made up with clean linen, and Ronan stopped in the doorway and looked at it as though he had never seen it before."I have not slept in this room since the trial," he said."I know.""It feels like it belongs to somebody else.""It belongs to you." I closed the door behind us. "The pack said so in the drying shed. They were very clear about it. Aisling will be disappointed if you sleep anywhere else."He laughed, and then he was not laughing, because I had come up close to him and put my hand flat on his c