Chapter 60 CHAPTER 062
Five of them, already shifted, moving fast. They hit the space between us and the door and the first was on me before the room finished registering what was happening. Close and dark and ugly, the kind of violence that accumulated until something ended. I put the first down hard. The second caught my shoulder before I turned it.
Harry took two near the doorway. I heard the impact that meant one had connected.
"Harry—"
"I'm fine. Keep going."
The third and fourth came together. I put the third down. The fourth got its teeth into my forearm before I broke its neck.
The fifth stopped. Looked at the room. Understood.
Came forward anyway.
I respected that. Then I put it down.
Harry was against the far wall, one hand pressed to his side, breathing in the controlled deliberate way that meant he was managing something that required management.
"How bad," I said.
"I've had worse."
"That isn't what I asked."
He looked down at the nearest body. "They're not from around here."
I crouched beside the closest one. The build was wrong. The markings where the shift had come through — visible, if you'd seen enough wolves from enough territories.
"No," I said. "They're not."
I straightened. "Can you walk."
He pushed off the wall without assistance. Answer enough.
The search for the children ran for four days and returned nothing.
The pack moved through it in that suspended state that came when something terrible had happened and nothing further had yet. People stayed close to their children. Conversations dropped to lower registers. The festival decorations came down.
On the fourth afternoon, a guard found me.
His face said enough.
Cian had appeared at the edge of the eastern woods as suddenly as he'd disappeared, as if something had simply put him down and stepped away.
I crouched beside him and didn't let my face do anything.
The mark was carved into the center of his chest. Clean lines, deliberate depth. Precise. I had never seen the specific configuration before. I looked at it long enough to memorize every line, then stood.
"Nobody touches him. Nobody moves him."
I pulled out my phone and called Perri.
She answered on the third ring, unhurried, existing at her own pace the way she always did.
"Alpha."
"Eastern woods. Now." I paused. "Bring everything."
A beat of silence.
"Ten minutes," she said, and hung up.
I stood over the boy and looked at the mark and thought about five wolves from nowhere near here, and about whatever had been done to this child, and about the four who still hadn't come back.
I waited.
◆◆◆◆
Ari's POV;
I was there when Perri arrived.
Not because anyone had asked me to be. I had been moving through the eastern corridor with a stack of folded linens when the word passed between two guards — eastern woods, now — and something pulled hard enough that I set the linens down and followed at a distance that could still be called accidental.
Nobody asked.
The scene at the tree line was quiet in the way that had nothing to do with peace. Guards stood at intervals with their backs deliberately turned. Stone stood apart from all of them, and on the ground nearby was a shape beneath a dark cloth.
Perri walked past all of it without slowing.
She was a small woman, which always surprised people who didn't know her. She had Sierra's cheekbones and none of Sierra's affect — where her daughter performed composure, Perri simply had it, the real kind that didn't require an audience.
She crouched beside the child and lifted the cloth and looked for a long time without speaking. She touched the mark on his chest with two fingers, tracing one line and then another. Something shifted in her stillness — a deepening, like she had moved further into herself.
Finally she stood.
"I need a day," she said.
The air changed.
"You have until tonight," Stone said.
"This isn't something I can—"
"Tonight, Perri."
She held his gaze with the steadiness of someone who had known him long enough. Then she looked back at the cloth on the ground.
"I'll have an answer by tonight," she said.
She gathered her bag and left the way she came.
I had already turned to leave when his voice came from behind me.
"With me."
He was already walking toward the house.
I followed.
Sierra was on the front steps. She had the look of someone who had arranged herself there with enough time to make it appear unintentional, her eyes moving between Stone and me with an expression she was keeping carefully neutral.
"Where are you going?"
Stone didn't slow. He reached the car and pulled open the driver's door.
"It doesn't concern you," he said, and got in.
I got in the passenger side without looking at Sierra. I could feel her gaze on the window as we pulled away. I kept my eyes forward and my hands folded and my face showing nothing.
The gate closed behind us.
He drove without speaking and I sat without asking.
The town thinned and disappeared, the road narrowing beneath the tree canopy. He pulled off eventually onto a track that barely deserved the name and drove it until it ended. When he got out I got out. When he walked I followed, through a break in the trees that opened onto a riverbank.
The water was high and fast and loud — the kind of river that had somewhere urgent to be. The sound filled everything.
Stone stopped at the edge. Then he turned and looked at me.
"Tell me what you know about the missing children."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You heard me."
"I don't know anything about the missing children. I'm a maid, I…"
He moved.
Not toward me. To the side, one slow deliberate step, positioning himself between me and the direction of the trees. It was a small movement that somehow rearranged the entire geography of where we were standing. The river was at my back now and he was in front of me and the distance between us was exactly close enough to mean something.
"Try again," he said.
"I don't know anything." My voice stayed level. I was proud of that. "I've been in the kitchens and the corridors. I carry linens and I set tables. I don't know anything about missing children."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then his hand closed around my wrist — not violent, not yet, but with a grip that made very clear the wrist was no longer mine to do anything with.
"I'm going to ask you one more time."
"I don't know anything." I met his eyes because looking away felt like it would cost me more. "I have nothing to tell you."
He turned, still holding my wrist, and walked toward the tree line. I had no choice but to follow — stumbling slightly on the uneven bank, pulled along at a pace that didn't account for my shorter stride.
He stopped at a large tree and pressed my back against it with one hand flat against my sternum. Not a blow. Just pressure. Just the fact of his hand and his size and the bark biting into my spine and nowhere to go.