They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 02

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 02

Nobody runs from a thing they’ve never been taught to fear.

So they didn’t run. They held me down and Margit Voss opened me up.

A Rendering isn’t surgery. Your wolf doesn’t live in your body — she lives under it, in the place where your name is kept, and the only way to get her out is to reach into that place with silver and pull until something gives.

I felt Sable fight.

Six years of silence between us — she’d stopped speaking the day I renounced my family, out of grief, I think — and she came up out of that dark like a drowning animal and she fought, and I felt every second of it through my spine and my teeth and my ribs.

I heard someone screaming. Then I recognized it.

“Hold the belly,” Margit said calmly. “She’s convulsing. Mind the pup, the Alpha wants it kept if it keeps.”

If it keeps.

Something tore.

And then the worst silence of my life.

No breath under my breath. No second heartbeat behind my heartbeat. The place where Sable had lived since I was eleven years old — gone, and cold, and open, like a house with the roof taken off.

I turned my head.

Elara Voss was standing in the candlelight with her back arched and her mouth open, and my wolf was going into her.

Her eyes went from brown to Sable’s gold.

“Oh,” Elara breathed. “Oh. She’s warm.”

She laughed and spun in a circle like a girl in a new dress, and my mate caught her and lifted her off the floor and kissed her in front of forty witnesses while I bled on their ritual stone.

“There she is,” Kael said into her hair. “There’s my girl.”

They left at 1 a.m.

All of them. The candles guttered out one by one. Nobody unchained me. Somebody threw a blanket over my legs on the way past, which I think was meant to be kindness.

Cassian Roe stayed.

My Beta. My father’s own pick, six years ago — he’ll guard you, little warden, he’d die first.

He pulled a stool over and sat down next to the stone like we were having coffee.

“Cassian.” My voice came out in pieces. “Get me a healer. I’m bleeding from somewhere that isn’t the cut.”

“Every healer in the Hollow is with Miss Voss,” he said. “First shift is dangerous. She might tear something.”

I laughed. It hurt so badly I saw white.

“Three weeks,” I said. “Three weeks and this pup would have been out and safe. Why tonight, Cassian? Why not wait?”

And he leaned in, and I watched him enjoy it.

“Because the Concord vote is in nine days,” he said, “and Thornfell needs a Luna who can stand at the Alpha’s shoulder and shift on the floor. You’ll be lying in with a newborn. She won’t.” He shrugged. “It was never six months, Luna. There’s a re-binding clause. After ninety days the wolf sets. She’s not giving Sable back. She was never going to.”

The Hollow tilted.

“He marked her,” Cassian added, conversational. “Three months ago. Half the pack heard it.”

Three months. Three months of him coming home and putting his hand on my stomach and saying how’s my son.

“And the healers,” I whispered. “They signed a statement. That a Rendering was safe for the pup. I read it.”

“They signed it three weeks ago,” Cassian said. “All eleven of them. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell you.”

I lay there under a blanket on a cold rock and understood that everyone I had fed, nursed, defended and covered for had sat in a room and agreed to let my baby die on a schedule.

Then I said, “Cassian. Look at my hand.”

He didn’t want to. Something in my voice made him.

He looked at the silver ring hanging off my bloody fingers. At the seam split open. At the dull red light crawling along the inside of the band like something breathing.

He went very, very still.

“That’s not a keepsake,” he said.

“No.”

“That’s a Warden’s seal.” He was on his feet, the stool clattering. “You renounced. You swore off the Hunt, you took a wolf’s name, you signed—”

“I signed for a man who marked his assistant while I was carrying his son,” I said. “Ask me tonight how I feel about my signature.”

Cassian Roe looked at the door. Then at the window. Then at the dark shape of the ridge beyond it.

And from sixty miles east, faint and long and rising, came a sound no wolf in that valley had ever heard live.

A hunting horn.