Chapter 4: The Drawer

Kellan's POV

I ran up the cell steps and across the yard in my bare feet, because I had left my boots by the bars.

The Alpha's house was dark.

I went through it without turning on a light.

My father's study was at the end of the east hall.

It still smelled of his pipe and the cedar oil he rubbed into the desk every Sunday.

I had stood in that room a thousand times and asked him for things.

The drawer was on the left, third from the top.

It was locked.

I had never once seen it open.

I put my fingers around the brass pull and tried to think where he kept the key.

I could not think.

So I tore the drawer out of the desk with both hands, and the wood split down the side.

Papers slid across the floor.

Under them was a flat tin with a faded picture of a bear on the lid.

I knew that tin.

I took the lid off.

Inside were seven hard sweets in wax paper, so old they had melted into one lump.

I had been eight years old when I told Brigid Harlow that this was where my father hid the good sweets.

Next to the tin lay my mother's wedding ring.

Next to the ring lay a man's handkerchief, folded in four.

I unfolded it.

It was a thin silver anklet with a small charm in the shape of a leaf.

It was Nessa's.

She had worn it on the day she taught me to swim.

I sat down on the floor of my father's study with the anklet in my fist, and for a while I made no sound at all.

Then I made one.

I had spent fifteen years hating the woman in the silver cell.

I had hunted a killer through this valley with my teeth set, and I had loved the man who kept Nessa's anklet in a drawer.

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