Chapter 20: The Night Watch

Cade's POV

The horn blew every dusk for two days.

Each time it sounded, more of my father's men went into the pack house and did not come out.

By the third night I had counted forty, and I had not slept for most of it.

I sat on the Harrow cabin's porch step with my back against the post and my wolf pacing in me.

The night before a blood challenge is quiet.

Orla was inside, asleep for the first time in two days, and Rose had made me promise to wake her only for a fire.

I did not have to be told.

I had decided, somewhere around the second night, that nothing would reach that door while I was breathing.

The porch boards creaked.

Rose came out with two mugs and handed me one.

It was plain tea, the cheap kind, with no powder in it.

I looked into it anyway, and she saw me do it.

"Good," she said. "Nobody forgets."

She sat down on the step beside me, and we drank in silence for a while.

"You've got your father's jaw," she said.

"I know."

"I used to feed you in that kitchen when you were four. You hid under the table from him."

I had not known she remembered.

"I hid under it a lot," I said.

"You stopped hiding when you were nine. That's when he started in with the belt."

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