Unlock its ok 29
The road out–2
1 didn’t know for certain that it was him. I had no proof of it and I wasn’t going to ask because
asking felt like the kind of thing that required more words than I had available right now. But nothing happened on this land tonight without his knowledge or his order and the shack/had been standing this morning and now it wasn’t and those two facts sat next to each other in a way that
was hard to look at directly.
I turned away.
Not because I couldn’t look at it. Because I’d looked long enough and there was nothing left there
that I needed to see and the horse under us was moving forward and forward was the only
direction that made any sense right now.
We passed through the tree line and Ashcrest disappeared behind us.
I didn’t look back again.
The forest was dark and quiet around us, the Appalachian trees thick on both sides of the road,
and the horses moved at a pace that was easy and unhurried. The cold was real but the cloak one
of the warriors had given me was warm and the heat of the man behind me kept the worst of it off.
We had been riding for about an hour when one of the warriors moved his horse up alongside ours to report something. He spoke in a low voice and I wasn’t paying close attention to the words, just
the sound of the forest around us, until I heard what he called the man behind me.
Alpha King.
I went very still.
The warrior finished speaking and dropped back and the road went quiet again and I sat there on
the horse and I let those two words settle into me and tried to make them fit against everything
that had happened since the shack door opened.
Alpha King.
Caius Blackthorn.
The man I had been hearing about my whole life in dropped voices and careful words. The man packs surrendered to before he even spoke. The man who had become the most feared ruler in the werewolf world at twenty years old and had held it for eight years without a single successful
challenge.
That was who was sitting behind me.
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That was whose arm was holding the reins on either side of me. Whose horse I was sitting on.
Who had crouched down in the dirt of my shack and reached for my wolfsbane chain and felt the
burn of it without flinching.
I became aware of myself in a way I hadn’t been a minute ago.
My hair was unwashed. I’d done what I could with the water in the room the night before but it was
still tangled and dull and nothing like the way a person’s hair should look. My clothes were the ones
I’d been wearing when he found me, the torn shirt and the oversized trousers held up with cord,
because I had nothing else and he’d told me to leave everything in the shack. The scars on my back were hidden under the cloak but they were there. The burn on my ankle was there. The
bruising on my face that Sera had treated was still visible, she’d told me it would take time to fully
fade.
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