Chapter 13: Open It

Rhea stood with her bound hands in front of her, and for a long moment she said nothing.

Three hundred Stonehollow wolves watched her do it.

"Tell us, girl," said the old man from the porch.

He had stepped out of the line with his hat in his fist.

"You taught my granddaughter to braid her hair," he said. "Tell us it's not true."

Rhea's eyes went to him, and something in her face gave way.

"It's true," she said.

A sound ran through the crowd, low.

"Every night," Rhea said, and her voice climbed. "Four months. A pinch in the pot before I poured."

"Why?" the baker's wife called.

"Because she's a healer's daughter. Anything more and she'd have tasted it."

She said it to the crowd, and then she turned and said it to me.

"You'd have tasted it. So I was patient."

My hands were steady on the tin.

I had expected to shake, and I didn't.

"Why, Rhea?" I asked.

"You know why."

"Say it for them."

She laughed, short and cracked.

"Because I'm his sister, and I was beta."

She jerked her chin at Dorian.

"Two years I sat at his left hand, eating what he left. He could have stood up and said my name once. One sentence."

"I swore," Dorian said hoarsely.

"You swore to a dead man! Not to me!"

Her face twisted, and it was not pretty.

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