Chapter 6 The Problem with Surviving #2
“I have to.”
“And if I live?”
He paused. That pause frightened me more than the first answer.
“If you live,” he said, “then we have a different problem.”
I laughed once, or tried to. “Comforting.”
“Do not mistake me,” Ronan said. “There are wolves outside this room arguing that killing you now would be mercy. Others believe it would be law. A few believe it would simply be prudent.”
“Prudent.”
“Yes.”
“Lovely. Hate to be murdered irresponsibly.”
Dr. Sava’s mouth twitched for half a second.
Ronan’s didn’t.
Ian stood so abruptly the chair scraped hard against the floor. The shift in him was immediate. The air pressed down. Henry woke in the corner and lifted his head.
Ronan looked at his brother now. “Sit down.”
“They are talking about killing her outside this door.”
“They are talking. They are alive because they have not done more.”
Ian’s hands had curled at his sides. I saw the tips of claws pushing through his fingers before he forced them back.
My heart stuttered.
His eyes were gold again.
Ronan stepped closer to him. “If you tear through my council, every human on the west terrace hears it. If you kill Silas Thorne on resort grounds, his pack calls it murder before sunrise. If you run with her, she dies before you reach the lower road, and then you go feral with a dead human in your arms.”
“Do not speak as if I do not know consequence.” Ian growled.
“I am speaking because you are one breath from forgetting you care.”
Ian’s jaw worked.
The monitor sped up. Mine. It had to be mine. Unless the machine had decided to track the entire room’s bad decisions.
Dr. Sava looked between them. “Both of you stop measuring antlers and let me keep the impossible patient breathing.”
“Antlers?” I whispered.
“Wrong species,” Ian said.
I looked at him. “Did you just make a joke?”
“No.”
“It sounded close.”
“It was not.”
“Work on that.”
His mouth didn’t move, but something in his face changed. Barely. It vanished before I could decide what it was.
Ronan took that in too. He saw everything and I disliked that about him immediately.
A knock came at the door. Everyone froze except Sava, who muttered something that sounded deeply insulting in another language and went back to checking the IV.
Ronan opened the door only wide enough to speak through the gap.
A man’s voice came from the hall. Angry, muffled, unfamiliar.
“The council demands an answer.”
Ronan’s tone cooled. “The council has one.”
“She is human.”
“Yes.”
“She is marked.”
“Yes.”
“She is a breach by existing law.”
“She is under my protection until I say otherwise.”
My stomach turned. Protection sounded better than imprisonment only when spoken by people who had not locked the door.
The voice outside dropped lower. “Alpha, if the enforcer cannot control himself, others must make the choice before dawn.”
Ian moved. He crossed the room so fast my eyes barely followed him. One second, he was beside the bed. The next, his palm hit the door above Ronan’s shoulder hard enough to crack the frame. The door shuddered and the voice outside stopped.
Ian leaned close to the gap. “If anyone makes a choice about her body,” he said, low and calm enough to be worse than shouting, “I will start with their hands.”
No one in the hallway answered.
Ronan didn’t move from under Ian’s arm.
“Step back,” he said.
Ian stayed there another second, then he stepped back and Ronan closed the door.
His face was controlled, but the muscle along his jaw was tight now.
“That,” he said, “is why she is alive.”
I stared at him.
“She is alive because if we kill her, you kill half the pack trying to stop us,” Ronan said to Ian. “You may expose us anyway. You may leave me no choice but to put you down in front of our own people.”
Ian flinched.
Ronan turned his eyes to me. “So, Ms. Morgan, understand where you stand. I do not know you. I didn’t ask for you. I do not care about your feelings, your wedding party, or your shock, except where they intersect with keeping my people alive and our existence hidden.”
“Ronan,” Ian said.
“No.” Ronan’s gaze stayed on me. “She needs truth more than comfort. If you die tonight, I will manage the damage. If you live, you will obey every restriction placed on you until I understand what my brother did and how to undo it without slaughtering my own council.”
The room seemed to shrink around the bed. My body shook under the blanket. Fever, fear, rage, all braided too tightly to separate.
“You’re threatening me while I’m dying.”
“I am explaining your odds.”
“My odds are terrible.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And if I live, I’m a prisoner.”
“For now.”
I looked at Ian. He didn’t deny it. That hurt in a way the bite had not reached. Because monsters were one thing. Men were another. I knew what it felt like when a man’s silence gave the room permission.
Ian’s face tightened as if he knew exactly where my mind had gone.
“I will not let them hurt you,” he said.
I closed my eyes. “You already did.”
No one spoke after that. Not for a while.
Sava worked over me with brisk hands and no pity.
Ronan left once, returned, spoke in low voices with guards, and left again.
Ian sat beside the bed because his touch kept the worst of the pain from becoming something I could not survive.
He asked permission once before putting his hand back on my shoulder.
I hated that the asking mattered. I hated that I said yes.
Sometime deep in the night, the fever climbed so high the room began to come apart. The ceiling rippled. The shadows breathed. Voices outside the door stretched long and thin, then snapped into strange clarity. I heard people arguing beyond the walls as if they stood beside my bed.
“She is suffering.”
“She is a breach.”
“She is dead already.”
“Then let the poison finish it.”
“If it does not?”
“It will.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Kill her before sunrise and burn the body.”
Ian’s hand went rigid on my shoulder. The sound that left him was not human. I opened my eyes. His face was turned toward the door, every line of him locked around violence.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
Ian looked down at me. I had not meant to say it. I didn’t know whether I was asking him not to kill them or not to leave me. Fever made honesty sloppy.
His eyes searched mine.
“I am here,” he said.
“You bit me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the reason they want me dead.”
“Yes.”
“You’re also the reason they haven’t done it.”
His mouth tightened. “Yes.”
“That is very inconvenient for my anger.”
A rough breath left him. It might have been pain. It might have been the remains of a laugh that didn’t know how to live in his body.
I closed my eyes again.
The fever rolled higher. At some point, I stopped knowing whether Ian’s hand was on my shoulder or inside my bones.
The pain became weather. Heat, ice, black lightning under my skin.
My body twisted against it until Sava and Ian held me down, one with medicine, one with the unbearable steadiness of his touch.
I heard Ronan again near the door. “How long?”
Sava answered from very far away. “If she follows every known rule, dawn kills her.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then your known rules are wrong.”
Silence.
Then Ronan, colder than before. “No one enters this room before sunrise without my order.”
“And the council?”
“If they want to test my brother tonight, they can do it over my dead body.”
That sounded noble. It was not. I understood him even through the fever. Ronan was not guarding me because I mattered, he was guarding the locked door to a disaster.
The mark pulsed and my eyes flew open. Then Ian was there, leaning over me.
“Cassie.”
My name in his mouth did something to the pain. Softened it.
No. Not softened. Focused it.
I hated that most of all.
“Don’t say it like you own it,” I whispered.
His face went still, then he nodded once. “I do not own anything of yours.”
My eyes burned, which was embarrassing, because I had managed not to cry when my sister stole my boyfriend and apparently a supernatural murder council was what finally made me sentimental.
“I want my dad,” I said.
Ian looked toward the door, something dangerous moving through his expression. “Ronan will not allow that tonight.”
“Of course he won’t.”
“The humans cannot know.”
“I am human.”
His gaze came back to me. For a moment, he looked almost struck by that. As if, in the middle of poison and pack law and whatever his wolf had decided, he had forgotten the simplest part.
I was human.
I had a father on the other side of this resort who thought I had fallen.
I had a sister whose dog I had chased because I was still stupid enough to love her through fury.
I had a life. A messy, humiliating, ordinary life, and it was being peeled away from me by men discussing secrecy outside the door.
The fever dragged at me again. Ian’s hand tightened carefully, not holding me down this time. Holding on.
“You need to survive until dawn,” he said.
“Bossy.”
“Yes.”
“You always this charming after biting women?”
“No.”
“Good.”
My eyelids grew heavy and the room blurred.
Ian’s voice came through the dark, low and hard. “Cassie.”
“What?”
“Stay.”
I would have laughed if I could.
Of course.
Even dying, someone had instructions.