They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 07

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 07

Apologize?” I said. “Kael. Look at me. Do you honestly think you’re worth an apology?”

Elara pressed closer into him and gasped and cupped her own stomach.

“Kael, it hurts. The wolf’s frightened. She can feel the hunters-” she blinked her wet lashes at me “-Vesper, hate me all you like, but Sable’s innocent. You’re scaring your own wolf.”

Using my wolf as a hostage. In her body. In front of me.

“DID YOU HEAR HER?” Kael roared. “She’s begging for you. Get on your knees!”

“Or what?”

“Or I brand you.” His voice dropped, which was worse. “Silver. Across that famous face. Then we’ll find out how proud Warden’s daughter really is.”

They brought it in on a rod. Silver–cored, glowing dull orange, hissing where the air touched it. To a wolf that isn’t a burn – it’s poison, and agony, and a scar that never closes.

I don’t have a wolf anymore. It would just have been a face full of molten metal.

Elara covered her mouth. “Kael, no, don’t do this for me-” and over her fingers, her eyes were shining.

He got a fistful of my hair and pulled my head up off the stone.

“Last chance.”

I spat in his eye.

“You thankless dog,” I said. “Do it.”

He never got the chance.

My father crossed that Hollow in a stride and a half and hit him in the face.

I heard Kael’s jaw go. The sound came back off the ceiling. He went backward over the instrument table and landed in a spray of his own blood, howling into his hands.

“You-” He was scrabbling on the flagstones. “Do you know who I am? I hold a Concord seat! I’ll have every one of you put down like rabid-”

Elara lunged forward shrieking, pointing at my father.

“You lunatics! Every Alpha in the region owes him! You’ll be in a silver cell by morning and I’ll come and watch them bleed you!”

Then she rounded on me, and her pretty face came apart.

“And you, Vesper – what are you? Trapper trash with a good jaw. Your family are nobody. Kneel, or I swear there won’t be enough of you left to bury.”

“Oh?”

She’d been so quiet everyone had forgotten her. That’s the thing about my sister. You always forget her until it’s too late.

She walked over to Elara, unhurried, and lifted one finger and traced it from the corner of her eye down to her jaw. Eara

froze like a rabbit under a shadow.

“Good elasticity,” my sister murmured. “You’re what, twenty–four? Perfect. The light in my study is lovely in the afternoon, you know. East–facing.”

Her hand closed around Elara’s throat.

She didn’t squeeze. She just held her, thoughtfully, feeling the pulse jump under her thumb.

“I’m sorry,” Nyx said. “Who was it you were going to bleed?”

Elara’s heels came off the floor.

Kael lurched up. My father put a boot on his chest and pushed him flat and stood on him, grinding down, until something

creaked.

“An Alpha,” my father said. “A Concord seat. Three hundred wolves.” He drew a knife and laid the point on Kael’s eyelid. “Boy, in my house you’d be a coat. Shall we find out which is harder, your eye or my blade?”

Kael’s face went white. A wet stain spread across the front of his trousers.

“Dad,” I said.

My father stopped.

“Don’t dirty your hands,” I said. “He’s mine. Let me finish it.”

My father looked at me for three long seconds.

Then he sighed, and put the knife away, and smoothed my hair back like I was eight years old.

Kael, released, dragged himself up the wall – and, I swear on my mother, laughed at me through a broken jaw.

“You?” Blood ran off his chin. “You’ll finish me? Vess, you couldn’t watch me get a parking ticket without crying. You’d have cut your own arm off for me.”

He grinned with red teeth.

“You haven’t got it in you.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t.”

I reached under the blanket and pulled out my mother’s ring, and turned it so the flat of the seal caught the light – and the tiny glass bead set beside the seam.

“Then I spent six hours chained to this rock,” I said, “and I found it.”