They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 03

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 03

I passed out somewhere after the horn, and I dreamed of home.

I was eight. Snow on the step. My father in the doorway with his sleeves rolled, scraping a pelt over a frame, and the whole yard smelling of salt and cold iron.

Never take one that’s feeding pups, little warden, he said. We’re not animals.

My sister Nyx was nine and sitting cross-legged on the floor with a jaw bone and a needle file, humming, building me a bracelet out of teeth. I wore it to school. Two teachers quit.

I was nine when a rogue pack came over the north wall and killed my mother in the kitchen while I hid inside the bread cupboard and watched through the slats.

After that I couldn’t sleep unless a light was on.

And I was twenty-three when a young Alpha with no seat and no money found that out, and started driving four hours after every negotiation just to lie behind me until I stopped shaking.

I said once, in passing, that I missed running.

He bought two hundred acres of dead timberland we couldn’t afford and fenced it so I’d have somewhere to shift where no hunter would ever mistake me for game.

A pack heiress offered him an alliance worth nine figures if he’d set me aside. He blocked her in front of me and said, out loud, in front of thirty Alphas:

“There is one woman I will ever love, and she gave up her whole name to stand in a room like this one.”

I believed him.

So I hid him from my family and hid my family from him. I signed my mother’s silver claim over to Thornfell. I mortgaged both of my properties behind my father’s back. I took a silver bolt through the shoulder in a parking structure that was meant for his spine, and never told him, because he was stressed at work.

And tonight that man held another woman up in the candlelight while my wolf screamed inside her.

Wake up, said something in me. Not Sable. Sable was gone. Just me. Wake up, Vesper. We are not dying on this rock.

I woke up.

Cassian was leaning over the stone, slapping my cheek, gray to the lips.

“Luna. Luna. How long has that ring been open?”

“Six hours.”

He made a sound.

“You trained in my father’s house,” I said. “You’ve seen the north room. You know what he does to men who put hands on his daughters.”

“There’s no road in,” Cassian said, fast, like he was talking himself down off a ledge. “There’s no road, the Hollow is silver-shielded, there’s no signal in or out, the Alpha built it that way for you—”

“The seal doesn’t use a signal,” I said. “It uses blood. My mother wore that ring into a bunker under a mountain and came out with three signatures. My father has the pair to it. It’s been red on his desk since eight o’clock.”

Cassian sat down on the floor.

And then I watched his face change — I watched a grown wolf do arithmetic and decide he’d been played by a woman bleeding out on a slab.

He came back and hit me across the mouth.

“Nice try,” he spat. “You’ve got nothing. You gave it all away. Nobody’s coming for a woman who isn’t anybody’s anymore.”

I turned my head and spat blood onto the Rendering Stone, and the stone drank it, the way it’s built to.

“Cassian,” I said. “You heard the horn.”

“That was a truck.”

“That was my sister,” I said. “She leads from the front. She always has.”

He went out of that Hollow so fast he took the door frame with him.

I lay in the dark alone with my chains and put both hands flat on my belly.

“Hold on,” I said. “Please. Please, please, hold on. Your grandfather’s coming and he’s going to take this valley apart with his hands.”

Nothing moved under my palms.

Then something warm slid down my thigh, and a cramp went through me like a wire pulling tight, and I understood two things at once.

The pup was coming, two months early, on a stone altar, with no healer within a mile of me.

And he had stopped moving two hours ago.