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I’m sorry wasn’t even enough. I hadn’t known how serious things were, but it wouldn’t have stopped me even if I had known. What a filthy, shameful little corner of myself this was. “Why did Alan tell me her name is nothing to FrostFur?”
She smiled so sadly and bitterly my heart broke. She curled a lock of my red hair around her finger, and her eyes brightened and rimmed red. “You look so much like her. So, so much like her. You could be her.”
“Please, Spring, you thought I’d come for something else. What was it?” I pleaded.
She pulled her hand back. “Rodero needs to straighten this out, that’s what I think.”
Rodero would not be straightening anything out. I closed my eyes for a minute as the world spun, then murmured, “Sterling is my mate.”
“For your sake, I hope you’re so desperate you’re delusional,” Spring said tartly.
“Guess you haven’t been able to reach Dad to get his side of things,” I said, reckless and groping through muck.
Spring snorted a second time. “You know he doesn’t believe in picking up the damn phone. Leave a message and hope he calls back that season.”
Must have been a SilverPaw male tradition to ignore the impersonal bidding of a bell. Alan wouldn’t have left a detailed message where someone might overhear, so the answering machine probably had messages like Rodero, call me.
Spring chuckled darkly. “I’d be scared of Rodero, too. You weren’t supposed to find out about any of this.”
“But I did,” I said.
Spring’s lips bent upwards. Not quite a smile, not quite a growl. “That’s Rodero talking. You don’t look a thing like him, but I see him in your mind. He turned you into his own little weapon, didn’t he.”
Maybe not a weapon, but certainly a tool.
She canted her head slightly to the side, a tinge of wary respect present. “Except he did too good a job, and you turned on him. He’s a dangerous enemy to have, Winter.”
Less dangerous now that he was wormfood. I laughed, feverish. “Wonder what Mom would have thought of how this ended.”
“Her heart would have shattered. It’s better she didn’t live to see what you’ve become.”
Yes, perhaps Spring was right. “Spring—did Everett ever tell you about—?”
“Ever—oh, you mean your grandfather.” Spring’s lips pressed into a very thin line. “Did Dad tell me about what?”
“Has he said anything about Sterling? Or Sterling’s mother?”
“No,” Spring said tartly. “Why?”
I rehearsed the question a few times in my fuzzy brain so I’d get it right. “Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s all this talk Sterling’s a hybrid, but he’s registered? Nobody disagrees he’s a bastard, but he does have a proper pedigree.”
She snorted. “The adjuncts do all the registrations.”
“Dad did his,” I said, trying to sound bland and failing. “It went straight to him. You know, since Sterling’s biological father refused to acknowledge him but his mother, Cerys, put up a fight about it.”
The air in the room shifted, or maybe that was just me swimming in my silver-hot brain, trying to stay above the pain in my arm. No pain quite like it. My arm had become an overcooked log of meat mushed into a shoulder joint. Spikes of pain shot through my neck into my lower jaw and wrapped around my ribs. Any little twitch sent the nerves aflame.
“I mean, all this happened… Sterling’s twenty-four so… what, twenty years ago? Twenty-two? His mother didn’t meet Garrett until Sterling was seven. Sterling was nine when they got married.” Once again I backed through the woods, laying out a trail of breadcrumbs to lead someone to a candy-covered gingerbread house. I was half out of my mind with silver toxicity, and my lizard brain’s instinct was to play more cloak and dagger.
Spring did not respond.
I went on. “If he’s a hybrid, then what’s Dad going to get out of pairing us? Me as an Abomination is worse than being Unwanted. We both know Dad isn’t stupid enough to commit political suicide.”
Spring’s lips pressed into a very, very thin line and something bright shifted in her eyes. She was in the pack’s bad graces. She wouldn’t run off to Alan or my grandparents or even Jared to tattle on what I’d just said. Might seem like she was defending me and she couldn’t do that.
“You know the Elder Council signed off on Sterling, yes?” I prodded.
“No, they didn’t,” she growled.
