Chapter 14: The Line

Torin's POV

The glass went at ten past three.

I was on the wooden chair under the corridor lamp, and I was across the floor before the last piece fell.

I had not slept since the border.

I had not meant to sleep tonight, either.

Her door was locked from inside.

I put my shoulder into it twice, and the second time the frame gave.

The sitting room was dark and cold, and the window stood open on the night.

A man was crossing the sitting room toward her bedroom door.

He was lean and dressed in black, and the knife in his hand had a silver edge that caught the lamplight from behind me.

He had come up three floors of bare stone wall to get there, and he did not look surprised to see me.

"Willa!" I shouted. "Stay in the room!"

He turned and came at me low.

Silver cuts a wolf in a way that steel doesn't.

The first pass opened my left forearm from wrist to elbow, and the burn went up my arm to the shoulder.

I took the blade hand in my right and drove him back into the wall.

His head cracked on the stone.

He was strong, and he fought like a man paid in advance.

His knee came up, and I turned it on my hip.

His free hand found the cut on my arm and dug in.

I made a noise I am not proud of.

I thought of the sixth night.

I had not meant to, and it came anyway.

At ten o'clock that night I had been sitting in the dirt a yard short of the line, with my back against a pine and my father's phone in my hand.

Six days I had asked the Beta for leave, and six days he had turned me back.

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