They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 05

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 05

Kael came through the far door first, because of course he did.

He stopped dead when the arc lights swung onto the stone.

I know exactly what he saw. I’d stopped being a person somewhere around midnight. My wrists were open to the bone. There were four puncture wounds low on my belly and a blanket soaked black to the hem, and the Rendering Stone had a channel cut into it for exactly this, and it was full.

His pupils blew wide. His hands started shaking.

“Who,” he said. “Who touched her.”

And God help me, some starving animal in my chest lifted its head and thought he still loves me.

Then Elara crawled into the light.

Bleeding from the throat where her own hands had been. Shaking. Gold still flickering in her eyes like a bulb about to go

“Kael,” she sobbed. “Kael, she called them.”

The room went quiet.

“She called hunters into the pack,” Elara said. “That’s what the ring was. I told you I saw it glowing, I told you and you said it was nothing-”

Kael turned to me. And every warm thing I’d ever put in that man’s eyes drained out of them at once.

“Tell me she’s lying,” he said.

I could have. Even then. I could have cried and said the wall fell, and he’d have wanted to believe me, because a man will believe anything that lets him keep being the good guy.

I looked him in the face.

“No,” I said. “I called them.”

His hands opened and closed.

“You brought the Pale Hunt into a valley with three hundred pups in it,” he whispered. “You’ve killed us. Do you understand that? Whatever I did to you tonight – whatever you think I did – you just murdered my entire pack.”

“Kael.” I could barely shape the words. “She put her claws in me. Look at the blanket. Look at it. Your son has not moved since one in the morning-”

“STOP” His voice cracked the air. “Stop using the pup. It’s obscene, even from you.”

Elara pressed her face into his ribs. “Don’t be harsh with her. She’s not well.”

And that was it.

That was the moment the last thread in me went, quiet as a hair.

stopped fighting the chains. I lay back in my own blood and looked at the broken ceiling and thought, very calmly. I am going to bury this Valley and everyone in it who touched me.

“Dad,” I said. “Nyx. Where are you.”

“Right here, love.”

The dust in the wall parted.

My father came through it in a long grey coat with the sleeves rolled, and he was wet to the elbows, and behind him the corridor had gone very quiet in a way corridors full of armed men do not normally go.

Kael drew himself up. “Who the hell do you think you-”

Then my father’s eyes found me.

He crossed to the stone. He looked at my wrists. At my belly. At the silver hook lying in the groove by my hip, still wet.

And Lucan Ashgrave, who did not weep at my mother’s funeral, made a small sound and put one hand over his mouth.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my little warden.”

He turned around.

“Nyx,” he said. “Doors.”

“Already,” said my sister.

She’d come in without anyone noticing, which is her whole personality. She was wandering the Hollow with her hands in her coat pockets, not looking at Kael at all.

She was looking at Elara.

“Hm,” Nyx said, and tilted her head like a woman at a shop window. “Dad. Dad, come and look at this skull.”

Elara shrank behind my mate.

“Zygomatic’s beautiful,” my sister said dreamily. “Almost no asymmetry. I’ve got six hundred in the case at home and I I haven’t got one like that.” She smiled. “I’d have to take the face off first, obviously. But I’m very neat.”

Kael stepped in front of Elara with his chest out and his eyes going red.

“You’re trespassing on Concord land,” he snarled. “I am an Alpha. I hold a seat. Whoever you are, old man, I’ll have your whole family put down-”

My father, without looking away from my wrists, said:

“Kael Draven. Six years ago you signed a page in my kitchen with blood out of your own thumb.”

He finally turned his head.

“Do you remember the clause, boy? Or shall I read it off the stone you spilled her on?”