My Mate Exiled Me for Being Weak, Then Couldn't Smell Me in His Dungeon novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The File in the Drawer

Roan can't stop thinking about the prisoner with no scent. He opens the drawer where he keeps the photo of the girl he exiled. Ends as he turns back toward the cells.

Roan's POV

I walked out of the interrogation room with the feeling that I should go back in.

I pushed it aside and kept walking.

"What did you pick up on her?" Edric asked the moment the door closed behind us.

"That's the problem. Nothing."

I took the corridor at a fast pace.

"No pack, no blood, no fear. A woman that beaten should stink of all three."

Edric fell in beside me.

"She came in with the rogues from the border. None of the guards noticed anything strange about her."

"Then ask them again."

"Find out who caught her, who beat her first and what they saw. Every detail."

"I'll talk to the patrol myself."

He turned off at the top of the stairs, and I crossed the yard to the castle alone.

My office was cold.

I had a stack of reports on the desk about rogue raids on the borders, and none of them said anything the last ten had not.

Every prisoner we took kept their mouth shut, even when they were beaten half to death.

Someone had trained them, and I didn't know who.

I had read the same page three times when my father walked in.

"Hello, son."

He sat down across from me with his hands folded on his coat.

"I hear the patrol brought in another truckload."

"They did. Nobody talks."

"And the missing wolves?"

"Nothing new."

For a year, wolves had been vanishing from packs across the country, and no Alpha could tell me where they went.

My father shook his head slowly.

"Strange business, Roan. I keep thinking the two are connected."

"So do I."

Edric came in then, without knocking, and dropped into the other chair.

"Well?"

"I found the guards who took her," he said.

"They have nothing. The whole thing went fast. The darts hit, the rogues turned on each other, and by the time our men got in, most of them were already bleeding."

He rubbed his forehead.

"But three of them swear they saw the white wolf in the fight."

Nobody spoke.

There hadn't been a white wolf in this land for hundreds of years.

We knew them only from old books, and the books said each one carried a different gift, some two or three, some only one.

For three years rumors had come in from every corner of the country that a white wolf had been seen.

It was never the same place twice.

"Could it be their leader?" Edric asked.

It was the question I had been asking myself for weeks.

"Could be," I said.

"I'll go down myself tomorrow and question everyone who lives through the night."

Several of them wouldn't.

"Come out with us tonight," Edric said.

"We're getting dinner. You haven't left this building in weeks."

"I don't have time."

"You do," my father said, and he said it gently.

"It has been three years since she died. You might have a second chance out there, you know. You won't find her in here."

I looked at him for a moment.

I had found her.

I had never told either of them.

"I don't want one," I said.

"You don't have to want her," my father said.

"Just think about it. Strong ones only, son. But you deserve somebody."

Edric stood and went to the door.

"Come if you change your mind."

My father followed him out and left me alone with the reports.

I didn't read them.

When the hall went quiet, I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk.

Under a stack of old maps lay a file I had not opened in three years.

I put it on the desk and opened it.

Her eyes were the first thing I saw, wide and blue.

The photograph was from her eighteenth birthday, and she looked young for it.

Ilsa Brennock.

She was my head warrior's only daughter.

After I sent her away, her father had searched for her day and night for six months.

I had sat at the same table with Harlan Brennock every week since and said nothing.

I had even sent out my own trackers, quietly, because some part of me needed to know where she went.

There wasn't a trace.

She had left my land and vanished.

The girl in that photograph was small and fragile, and so was the mate I had buried.

I didn't want to bury another one.

I had never once regretted sending her away.

I closed the file, locked it up and turned off the lights.

I did not go to the dinner.

I went down the stairs to the cells instead and walked along the cold passage, past the groans and the sleepers, to the cell where the guards had left the prisoner with no scent.

She lay curled on her side on the floor with her ruined hand against her chest.

The guard at the door straightened.

I held up a hand to keep him quiet.

I breathed in through my nose, slowly.

For one breath there was something.

Wild honey and wet pine.

It was the smell that had stopped me in the cemetery three years ago.

Then it was gone, and the corridor smelled of blood and damp stone.

I stood at the door a long time.

Then I told the guard to leave her alone until morning, and I went back upstairs without telling anyone what I had smelled.

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