20 Sloane #2
“No.” My voice came out wrong—too high, adrenaline and the animal shredding the operative stoicism I’d worn my whole life. “No. We don’t do this. We fight. We shift, we take that thing on our feet, we make it earn every one of us—”
“Sloane.” Maren, low.
“You don’t get to ask him for this.” I turned the knife on her—on Maren, on the woman who’d fed me and patched me up and taught me to disappear, on the closest thing to a mother I’d ever had—and my hand would not steady, for the first time in my professional life my hand would not steady, because the thing driving it wasn’t training anymore.
It was teeth. “You don’t get to hand me chalk and ask me to draw the circle he dies in.
I won’t. Do you understand me? I will not use my hands to help my mate kill himself. I’ll cut yours off first.”
“Sloane.” Maren didn’t flinch from the blade. She looked at me over it, and her eyes were wet and unafraid, and that was worse than any argument. “I know.”
“Don’t.” My breath was coming in tears now, ragged, and underneath the tears the wolf was howling, a sound I could feel in the roof of my skull, existential and endless. He is ours. He is ours. They are trying to take what’s ours and you are helping them—
“Don’t you dare ‘I-know’ me—”
Behind me, Finn said my name.
Not down the bond. Out loud, in the freezing dark, low and even and entirely without fear, and it went through me like the blade in my hand.
I didn’t turn. I kept the knife on Maren. If I turned, if I looked at him, the wolf would take the opening—I could feel her waiting for it, coiled, certain that the sight of his face would break my grip on her and let her surge up and end this her way.
I felt him step around me.
Around my body, into the space between me and Maren, so that when I finally turned my head he was there, filling my vision, his face gray in the dying blue light and gold already bleeding up into his eyes.
And then he reached down the bond and did something I did not know a mate could do.
It came like warm water poured over a burn. A wave of it—vast, deliberate, absolutely without panic—rolling down the thread that joined us and folding around my screaming animal like two enormous hands closing over a thrashing bird. Peace, it said, without words. Peace. I have you. Be still.
The Treaty Court weight of him, the same authority that had stood between people who wanted each other dead, turned inward now and aimed at the one creature in the world it could not command by right, only gentle.
The wolf fought it. She fought it hard—one last convulsion, one last lunge at the bars—and then the warmth simply held her, would not be thrown off, would not stop, and she went down.
Soothed against her own will, panting, pinned under the loving weight of the very bond she was trying to protect, and through the sudden roaring quiet I understood what he’d done.
He’d taken the war out of my body and into his own hands.
He’d made it so the human part of me could stand up straight.
That’s cheating, I thought at him, wild, half-broken.
Yes, the warmth answered. Let me.
His fingers folded over mine on the knife hilt—icy, all of him had gone to ice—and he closed his hand over my white-knuckled grip and held it, gently, the way you’d cup something you were afraid of crushing, and he pressed down, slow, until the point of the blade dropped toward the floor.
“There it is,” he murmured. “There you are.”
“Finn—”
“Look at me. Not the wall. Not Maren. Me.”
I looked at him.
His other hand came up and framed my face, cold palm along my jaw, thumb catching under my eye where the tears had frozen on my skin, and the tenderness of it broke something in my chest that the Saint’s weight hadn’t managed to touch.
“You know what I am,” he said. Quiet. Just for me, though the whole tunnel could hear it.
“You’ve known since you watched me open a three-hundred-year lock with my own blood.
The Treaty Court doesn’t send the Executioner to negotiate, Sloane.
It sends him to take the hit so the innocent walk away.
My bloodline. That’s what the marks mean.
That’s what they’ve always meant. For hundreds of years.
” His thumb moved against my cheek. “I’ve stood in a hundred rooms and been the wall between people who wanted each other dead.
This is the same thing. It’s only the same thing. ”
“It is not the same thing.” My voice cracked all the way through, and inside me the wolf strained against his warmth, weeping in her own language. “In those rooms you walked out.”
A ghost of a smile on his mouth.
“Finn.” I was shaking, and the shaking was the two of us now, the human and the animal, both of us undone.
“You don’t understand—I can’t. I clawed through hell every single day of my life to get to something worth keeping, and I finally found it, I found the pack and I found the home and I found you, and you want me to draw a circle and stand here and watch—”
“I want you to live.” He said it so simply that it stopped me. “You, and them, and—”
His hand left my face. It flattened low over my stomach, the way it had an hour ago against the wall, and he held it there, and his gold eyes came down to look at where his hand rested, and his voice dropped so low I felt it more than heard it.
“—and this.”
Inside me the wolf went very, very still. Not soothed this time. Understanding.