Page 48

Then her expression changed.

"On Delphine's orders, apparently."

If Tamsin's gossip was true, then lovely little maid had not been a joke.

Delphine might actually have sent someone into the dark after me to make sure I was caught.

Anger came first, immediate and clean. Something colder followed it.

If Callum had been telling the truth, Delphine had not merely wanted me owned.

She had wanted me hurt.

I lowered my mug and stared into it.

So there was, in fact, a functioning infirmary somewhere in the fortress, and apparently everyone except me had possessed enough sense to use it. I decided that was not a thought worth examining too closely.

Then I noticed Kaelen.

He sat at the head of the Fenhall table, eating breakfast with the same controlled, unhurried precision he brought to everything else. His right hand rested beside his plate.

The knuckles were split and swollen.

The skin across them was fresh and angry, right over the thin old scratch he had gotten on the first night.

I put my tea down carefully.

The black shape I had seen on the ridge hadn't been a trick of hypothermia.

Kaelen had thrown me away in front of everyone, and then, sometime later, he had broken Callum Rourke's jaw for coming after me in the dark.

I couldn't decide whether I was grateful, furious, or unsettled by the fact that he had been watching me closely enough to intervene.

First Hollow in forty years, everyone kept saying.

They weren't wrong, exactly. I had made the decisions that kept the red cord off my wrist. I had chosen where to hide, when to move, and when to keep going even when I was cold, frightened, and injured.

But Jax had warmed me. Silas had carried me home. Kaelen had removed a wolf from my path before I ever knew the danger was there.

I had made it to dawn uncaught.

I had not made it there alone.

The distinction mattered.

Kaelen never looked up from his breakfast.

Even so, the ache beneath my breastbone, the one that had been bothering me for the past week, eased with one slow pulse of warmth.

For the first time, it didn't feel like a bruise.

6

Chapter 6

Wren

For three days, everyone at Ironmoor looked at me differently, and I hated it almost as much as I had hated the laughing.