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“I remember almost nothing except the most excruciating pain. You can’t think. There is nothing in your brain except agony. It is a pain you cannot fathom. Aside from a few jumbled memories, the next clear, real memory I have is waking up in a hospital eight months later, so weak I couldn’t talk.
“From what I’ve been able to piece together, the local boys—even Landyn—lost their nerve once my skin started to melt. I managed to crawl halfway back home. My parents found me about ten hours later. The only thing that saved my life was the crawling scraped the salts out of the wound. My father dropped some IVs into me like a field medic and then onto the jet to Iceland.”
“Iceland?” That sounded like a random choice of locales.
“They knew there were wolves in Iceland, and since Iceland is so small, they called every hospital and doctor in the country asking for treatment of ‘puff adder venom.’”
“That’s fucking brilliant.” Silver exposure that needed medical care by a human doctor was often passed off as an adder or black mamba exposure.
“It’s a seven hour flight, and I was twenty-four hours out from the injury, and mostly dead. I’d managed to die once on the plane. My parents had no choice but to check me into a private hospital. I was in organ failure and having seizures. Supposedly I was conscious and cognizant enough between seizures to answer questions. I am very glad I don’t remember any of it. My parents do, unfortunately. They passed it off as a billionaire’s son being the target of an exotic attack. A werewolf doctor heard about an American kid getting brought in for puff adder venom, showed up, and took over.”
Cerys and Garrett had problem solving down to an art. “So if it was Iceland, and the doctor who showed up was a wolf, that’s how you knew the FrostFangare.”
“Yes. The doctor actually was a FrostFangare.”
He didn’t add anything else, so I prodded, “So why did you tell the EarthSpine to ask what happened to Landyn? What did you do to them? Did your father do something?”
“That’s how I know my father will never be found guilty of violating his privilege,” Sterling said with a cold, cruel smile. “Because we didn’t do anything to the IceEar.”
“Oh?” I asked, instinctively recoiling away from the horrible sheen his scent took on. Like oil moving on very dark water.
“My father returned to IceEar a year later—when it was obvious I was going to live—to tell them he wouldn’t tolerate silver on his land. Silver is war. Silver is death. It was news to IceEar. Landyn had hushed it up. The end result was the pack tore itself apart trying to figure out what to do.”
“What do you mean ‘what to do’? There was a question about what to do?” Depraved young males had decided to pour silver nitrate onto another male for kicks. There was only one thing to do, and it involved a very deep hole.
I rolled down the window and hung my head out until I stopped feeling sick.
He reached across the truck and pulled his hand down between my shoulder blades, along the curve of my spine. “My heart stopped three times. My entire body failed. I couldn’t feed myself. I had to learn to walk again. My father had to bathe me. They used me for sport out of the most petty kind of hatred and didn’t even have the courage to own it. What balances those scales, Winter?”
“Nothing,” I said, head hanging out the window. Not even Jerron in his most depraved, drunken, stupid moments would have run to the nearest medical supply store for some salts.
“Exactly. Nothing. And nothing is what they received. When the IceEar did not automatically offer the wolves who had picked up silver, the Mortcombes walked away without further comment. The old stories that silver destroys the claw that hold it are true. The IceEar, having no Mortcombe to argue with, argued with each other. The pack still exists, but it has been poisoned by silver. They will never recover. I am scarred, but I am not stained.” Sterling looked at me sideways with those bright hazel eyes and a little feral smile on his lips, and a cruel, vicious victory on his scent. “I have a pack, a family, a career, enemies that matter, and most important of all, I have you.”
He ran his thumb over my rings. “You are a trophy bride. You are the brightest jewel in my crown.”
He kissed my dirty, grubby fingers.
My heart did strange little flip-flops and gasps under my ribs. “And you’re not even drunk.”
“I am exhausted,” he said. “It’s sort of the same thing.”
“But not nearly as much fun.”
He glanced at the bruising on his forearm and smiled that sharp, small smile to himself. “Don’t be sure of that.”
It Was Elementary
What passed for my hometown was small. Population maybe six or seven hundred on a good day. No stoplights, no crosswalks, and all the commerce concentrated on one street along three blocks. Exactly one bank. No chance of miscommunication on where to be.
It was past eleven. We were late. Jerron was also nowhere to be seen.
Sterling rested his hands on the wheel. “He acts like he knows what’s in that box. Under all that anger, he was anxious. So was Daniel. Daniel was more anxious than he was.”
I leaned my head back and remembered to not close my eyes. “I doubt the box exists at all.”
“Really?”
I snorted a grim laugh. “My father left me to manage getting the bills paid. I inherited faking his signature from Mom. I never saw a bill or notice, not that Jerron would know that.”
