My Blood Awakened, His Reign Ended novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Next Cell

In the dungeon dark the werewolf hostage Ronan counts her seals by scent and catches her when the iron drains her. Lucian arrives with a bowl: the human is worse tonight.

I did not answer him at first.

The dungeon had already taken the feeling out of my fingers, and my mother's name was the last thing I expected to hear in it.

"Who's there?" I said.

"The only other prisoner in this wing."

The voice was low and rough.

"Four years in this cell," he said. "They moved the guards out last winter because I stopped being interesting."

Iron scraped on stone as he shifted.

"I'm Ronan Kell," he said. "Alpha of the Northern packs."

I knew the name.

Every child at Court learned it at bedtime.

It was the name of the wolves who came over the walls and took the capital's streets for a night.

"The wolves' Alpha died two hundred years ago," I said. "My mother killed him."

"My father was the Alpha. I'm the son who came to renew the treaty."

He said it flatly.

"I came under the banner of truce, with a gift basket," he said. "Your Elders locked the door behind me and kept the basket."

I laughed, and it hurt my ribs.

"That sounds like them."

"It does."

I pulled my knees to my chest.

The cold in this place was not ordinary cold.

It sank into the marrow and made every old ache sing.

By the time the lamp outside burned down, I could not stop my teeth chattering.

"They put you here for a day and a night," Ronan said from the dark. "Why?"

"I cut up a wedding dress."

"Yours?"

"It was mine until noon."

A pause.

"I'm starting to like you," he said.

"You don't know me."

"I know you smell like ninety-four broken seals."

I went very still.

"I'm sorry?"

"Wax and iron. Like a seal cracking when you press it with your thumb."

I heard him move closer to the bars between us.

"Maren Ashmere set ninety-nine of them in her daughter before she died," he said. "My father told me about it the night he lost. I thought it was a story to scare pups."

My mouth had gone dry.

"Ninety-four," I said.

"Five left. They've been bleeding you for three years, one cup at a time, and every cup cracks one."

He paused.

"Do they know?"

"The Elders?"

"Whoever's holding the bowl."

I thought of Lucian carrying it across the hall like something holy.

"No," I said. "I don't think anyone knows."

"Then they're stupid, and I'll enjoy watching it."

"What happens when they're all gone?"

"Your mother's seals were never meant to keep you weak." He was quiet a moment. "They were a lid on a pot, Isobel."

I had not told him my name.

"How do you know it?"

"Your mother shouted it when she came for my father. I was thirty feet away."

His voice did not change.

"She put a spear through his throat," he said. "She was still saying it when the wolves got to her."

The silence went on long enough that I understood what he was not saying.

His father was dead because of my mother.

I was sitting on the stone floor of the cell where the Court kept him because of what my mother had done.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. Nobody asked you to be there."

I tried to stand.

My legs went out from under me halfway, and my shoulder met the bars between our cells.

His hand came through the gap.

It closed around my wrist, big and scarred and hot as a stove, and held me up.

"Easy," Ronan said.

His thumb rested over my pulse.

I could feel every ridge of the chain marks across his knuckles.

I should have pulled away.

Instead I leaned into the cold iron and let him hold me for as long as it took to breathe.

"You're warm," I said stupidly.

"I'm a wolf. The iron doesn't bother me. It only bothers your kind."

He drew his hand back slowly.

"Sit," he said. "If you faint on the floor, they'll find you in the morning and call it a punishment."

I sat against the bars.

I could hear him breathing on the other side, slow and even, a foot from my head.

It was the first time in three years that anyone had been near me without wanting something from my veins.

A door opened at the end of the corridor.

Lamplight swung over the wall.

Lucian came down the steps with a silver bowl in one hand and a guard at his shoulder.

He did not look surprised to see me on the floor.

"Isobel," he said. "Get up. Lenora took a turn for the worse an hour ago."

I stared at the bowl.

"She needs more."

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