Chapter 22 A Cruel Kind of Truth #4
It came silently, with the memory of blood in a basin and the boy he had been before leadership turned his kindness into calculation. I loved him, and tomorrow I might have to go through him. If he stood between Cassie and the door, I would go through him.
He deserved better from me but Cassie deserved life more.
I stepped out of his grip and Ronan’s hand fell slowly.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
I thought of the bond inside my chest. The binding.
The leash. Whatever name made it honest. If I tore it out before the full moon, it would kill me.
I knew that with a certainty that lived deeper than law.
A wolf didn’t survive having a mate bond severed at the root.
Maybe Cassie would. She was human. The magic had never been made for her body.
It might burn her, scar her, hurt her enough that she would hate me for it if she lived.
Let her hate me. Let her live.
I would break it. Then I would use whatever time I had left to get her family out.
If guards tried to stop me, I would kill them.
If the council barred the way, I would turn their old laws red.
If Ronan sent men after her, I would bury friends.
If Ronan came himself, I would pray he was faster than grief.
And Silas.
Silas had built the trap. Silas had put Evelyn in that circle. Silas had turned Cassie into collateral and me into a knife aimed at my brother’s throat.
I would find him before the end and I would make sure he knew exactly what kind of weapon he had stolen.
“I am going back to Cassie,” I said.
Ronan’s eyes sharpened. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one you get.”
“Do not make a martyr of yourself.”
A strange calm opened inside me. “I was never holy enough for that.”
“Ian.”
I turned away.
His voice followed me, stripped down and rough. “Do not make me lose you too.”
I stopped. There was the second goodbye, and it hurt more because he had given it to me. I didn’t look back. If I looked back, he would see everything. He would see the decision. He would see that his brother was already walking toward death and only waiting for the right door to open.
“You should have thought of that before you made peace with her death,” I said.
Then I left him in the corridor.
No one stopped me on the way back.
The resort had become a countdown. Every hallway smelled of fear, silver, old polish, and decisions made by wolves who would never dirty their own hands.
Guards stepped aside before I reached them.
Some bowed their heads. Some watched me with the flat, wary eyes of men trying to decide whether loyalty would survive the next order.
It would not.
When I reached the suite, Sava was seated outside the door with a book open in her lap and a blade resting across the page. She looked up once, and the book closed.
“You look calm,” she said.
I didn’t answer and her face changed. Sava had seen too many dying men to mistake calm for peace.
She stood. “Ian.”
“Is she awake?”
“No.”
“Fever?”
“No.”
“The mark?”
“It darkened once after you left. Settled again when I sat with her.”
I reached for the handle but Sava stepped in front of the door.
My wolf growled.
Sava didn’t move. “Do not make that sound at me. I have been growled at by better men in more convincing states of collapse.”
“Sava.”
“What happened?”
“Move.”
“No.”
I looked at her then. She looked back. Smaller than me. Older than my rage. Unimpressed by both.
“Whatever you are carrying,” she said, “ask yourself if she deserves to wake under the weight of it.”
“She will not.”
Sava went very still. She heard the shape of the answer.
The third goodbye waited there, and I hated that she heard it before I could hide it.
Sava, who had stitched me together more times than I could count.
Sava, who had called me an idiot at sixteen while setting my broken hand.
Sava, who had threatened silver in my spine because Cassie needed care and I was too feral to understand help.
Sava, who would try to save me if she knew. I could not afford that kindness.
“She was never supposed to be part of this,” I said.
“No,” Sava answered. “She was not.”
“They made her into a handle.”
Her eyes closed for one brief second. So she knew, enough of it anyways.
When she opened them again, they were bright with anger. “Cassie is not a handle.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” My voice came rougher. “That is why she has to be free of me.”
Sava’s face hardened. “Ian.”
“Help me keep her alive tomorrow.”
“That sounds like goodbye.”
I said nothing and her mouth tightened. For a moment, I thought she might call for Ronan. She might use the blade. She might do something practical and terrible because she knew what wolves sounded like when they had chosen not to survive.
Instead she stepped aside and the mercy of it nearly broke me.
“I will be outside,” she said.
“I know.”
“If you do something stupid, I will be very angry.”
A breath moved through me. Not quite a laugh.
“You usually are.”
“Yes,” she said. “Do not make me grieve you and be right at the same time.”
I opened the door before I answered that badly.
Cassie lay curled beneath the blanket, her face turned toward the place I had been when I left.
The lamp had been lowered until the room was all amber shadow.
Her hair spilled across the pillow. Her mouth was soft with drugged sleep, but the tension remained between her brows.
I crossed to the bed and sat beside her. Her hand moved almost immediately, searching, so I gave her my fingers. She caught them with a faint sigh.
The binding warmed. I forced myself to use that word.
Binding.
Pain moved through my chest with the correction. It felt like betrayal, though I didn’t know whether I was betraying her, myself, or the lie that had kept me breathing.
I looked at our joined hands. Cassie’s fingers were human. Warm. Mortal. There were small scratches along her knuckles from the hunt. Dirt still lived beneath one nail no matter how carefully Sava had cleaned her.
Nothing about her was a leash.
That was the part Evelyn could never understand. The magic might have used her as one. The circle might have turned her touch into command. The bond might be rotten all the way down to its first root.
Cassie was still Cassie. She was still the woman who had looked at a room full of predators and understood the politics faster than half of them.
The woman who had wanted one night for herself before death.
The woman who had laughed while bleeding because if she stopped laughing, the fear might win.
The woman who had called me back, whether by magic or courage or both.
She deserved to walk out of this world whole. She deserved to forget the shape of my teeth.
I pushed the binding away and pain struck hard enough to darken the edges of my vision. My free hand curled in the sheet but I didn’t make a sound.
Cassie frowned in her sleep and I stopped at once. The pain eased by degrees, leaving a hollow ache where hope had been.
So that was the edge.
Good.
I would need to know it tomorrow.
Cassie’s lashes fluttered. “Ian?”
“I’m here.”
Her voice was thick with sleep and medicine. “You left.”
“Ronan needed me.”
“Mmm.” Her eyes opened halfway. They were unfocused, but even drugged she searched my face. “Something happened.”
“No.”
“Liar.”