Chapter Four: What He Didn't Tell Me

Cain moved me off his lap like I weighed nothing. One second I was wrecked and warm and his, and the next I was on my feet and he was already across the room, pulling a gun from a drawer like it was a reflex older than thought. The man who had taken me apart with his hands sixty seconds ago was gone. What stood in his place was something colder than Damien had ever been on his worst day. "How many," Cain said. "Six at the front gate. More in the trees." Roan's eyes flicked to me, then away. "Hale sent his second. Marcus." Something passed over Cain's face — not fear. Recognition. The kind of recognition that has history bleeding out of both ends of it. "Marcus is still breathing," Cain said softly. "That's an oversight I'll fix tonight." "You know him." I hadn't meant to speak. Both men looked at me. "Stay in the room, Wren." "You know Damien's second by name." I pulled the borrowed shirt straight, my voice steadier than my hands. "You said you'd been watching Crescent Hollow for three years. That's not watching. That's a war you started a long time before I fell into your lap." For one heartbeat the cruel king of Ironfang just looked at me, and I saw the thing he'd been keeping behind the storm all night. Then he said, "Put her in the cellar room. Lock it." "What no" But Roan's hand was already on my arm, not rough, almost gentle, steering me toward a door at the back. The last thing I saw before it closed was Cain checking the gun, his jaw set, walking out into the rain toward men who had come to his home to kill him. The cellar room was small and dry and had no windows. I pressed my ear to the door and heard nothing but my own pulse. So I did the only thing a Beta's daughter raised on the bottom rung knows how to do. I found the other way out. There's always another way out. My father taught me that, before the pack ruined him, before the shame killed him every room has a weakness if you stop panicking long enough to find it. A loose grate. A gap above the old coal chute. I went through it on my belly in the dark and came up behind a stack of oil drums at the edge of the yard, close enough to hear. Cain stood in the floodlights. Six of Hale's wolves fanned out before the gate, and at their center a broad man with a silver streak in his beard Marcus, the pack's second, the man who'd handed me my dead father's last paycheck like it was charity. "You've got nerve, Marrok," Marcus said. "Hosting a wedding guest." "She's not a guest." "No?" Marcus smiled. "Then it's true. You finally got your hands on her." He shook his head slowly. "Eight years you've circled that girl like a vulture and Damien never could figure out why. A nothing Beta's brat. And here you are." I stopped breathing. Eight years. I was a child eight years ago. "Walk away, Marcus," Cain said. His voice never rose. That was the terrifying part. "You came to deliver a message. Deliver it and crawl home." "The message is simple." Marcus's smile died. "Damien knows what she is. He knows what you'll try to do with her now that she's free of the bond. And he's giving you one chance to hand her back across that line before this becomes the kind of war neither of us walks out of." He spread his hands. "He'll even let you keep your little club. All he wants is the girl." "And if I say no?" "Then he tells the whole territory the truth about you." Marcus's eyes glittered. "About what you really are, Cain. About what happened the night her father died." The world went very quiet and very loud at the same time. My father. Cain moved so fast I didn't see it. One moment he was ten feet from Marcus and the next he had a fistful of the man's collar, the gun pressed up under his jaw, and every wolf in that yard had a weapon raised and none of them dared fire. "You want to talk about that night," Cain breathed, "out here, in front of my men. Be very, very sure." For the first time, Marcus looked afraid. "Tell Damien I got his message," Cain said. "And tell him the next person he sends to my gate to say her father's name comes back to him in pieces." He shoved Marcus backward into his own men. "Now get off my land." They went. Engines, taillights, swallowed by the rain. And I stood behind the oil drums with my heart in my throat, because I finally understood that I had walked out of one lie and straight into a deeper one. Cain Marrok hadn't found me in the mud by accident. He'd been waiting for me at that line for eight years. "You're supposed to be in the cellar." I spun. He stood three feet away, the gun holstered now, rain running down the hard planes of his face, watching me with an expression I couldn't read. "What did you do," I whispered. "The night my father died. What did you do?" For a long moment I thought he wouldn't answer. Then the cruelty drained out of his face, and what was left underneath was so much worse because it looked like grief. "I didn't kill him, Wren," Cain said quietly. "I'm the one who tried to save him." The rain came down between us like a wall. "And the man who gave the order to put your father in the ground," he said, "is the same man who knelt for your best friend tonight."