I Cut My Alpha's Bond, So the Lycan King Came Hunting novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Hill

Cassia's POV

The Lowwater valley has a chain-link fence around it now, eleven feet high, with a gate and an Eckert Timber sign.

I put my hand on the gate post and the ward in it opened for me.

Dacre watched that with no expression at all.

"Wardens," he said.

"Wards bend for the Coleridges."

"I was told that was a story," he said.

"So was the King's ambush."

He didn't answer, and we walked in.

It was a wide green valley with a brown river running down the middle of it, low in autumn.

The hills on either side were gold and dry.

I had lain on the east hill for fourteen hours on a day I had spent nine years not thinking about.

It took me twenty minutes to climb it.

My legs knew the way.

The nest was where I had left it.

A shelf of grey rock between two boulders, a scraped hollow in the lichen long enough to lie in.

A clear line of sight across the river to a flat gravel terrace six hundred yards away.

I stood and looked at it a long time.

Dacre stood a little behind me and said nothing, which I was learning was a gift he gave.

"Here," I said finally. "I lay here. The rifle on that rock. The table was at the gravel, with the post beside it, and your people stood behind in two rows."

"Eleven," Dacre said. "My brother, and ten."

"You were on the left."

"I was."

I looked at the left side of the gravel terrace.

There was nothing there now but thistles.

"And the ridge," I said, "was there."

I turned and pointed across the river at the long bare hill that closed the valley on the far side.

"Forty men in grey, prone along the top, rifles pointed down at the terrace. I saw the lenses catch the light. The Marshal told me that was the signal that the ambush was set."

"The ridge," said Dacre.

"Yes."

"Look at the road."

I did not understand him at first.

Then I followed his hand.

A dirt track ran up the far hill, switchbacking along the back slope to the crest.

At the bottom of it was a gate.

It was a heavy steel gate, the kind a timber company puts across a haul road.

On the gate was the same sign.

"That's a fire road," I said slowly.

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