The End of Us novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Locked Cellar

Keith's POV

Maud Dunstan did not need the guard.

She needed six elders, and she still owned five of them.

They voted inside an hour, in the Hall's side room, with the door open and the pack watching.

Five to one, Isla Sheridan was unfit to answer for herself, and the pack's care would hold her until the Moon Council sat.

I stood in the doorway and said what I had seen on the north bank seventeen years ago.

They heard me out.

Then the eldest of the five reminded me that I was a guest on Dunstan ground, and that the Alpha of Stroud had no vote and no voice at a Dunstan table.

The same eight of Maud's hired men walked me to the gate.

They did not touch me, because I was an Alpha.

They did not need to.

Behind me, I heard Isla say my name.

I did not look back, because if I had, I would have killed somebody on the lawn.

I waited until two in the morning.

The old granary elder had told me about the drain.

It ran from the cellar under his hall to the cold rooms beneath the Hall, a stone channel left by the founders, and no Dunstan had used it in a century.

I took the iron grate off with my hands, and I went in on my stomach in black water.

Her cell was the third door in the cold passage.

I knew it by her scent before I reached it, and by the way my whole body leaned toward the wood.

The door was bolted from outside.

I broke the bolt, and she stood in the middle of a stone room with a candle stub and a coat, and she looked at me for a long moment without speaking.

"You're late," she said.

"I was thrown out."

"I heard."

I crossed the floor and took her face in my hands, and she grabbed my wrists.

"Two guards on the stairs," she said, very low. "They changed over ten minutes ago."

"Then we go out the way I came."

"Show me."

I took her hand and led her back down the passage.

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