I Will Never Be Yours novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate
A truck of captured rogues stops at the King's gate, Sorcha knows the voice that orders them to the dungeon, and from her cell she hears him ask each prisoner about a woman who ran from Ironcrest: he is hunting her.
The truck stopped, and my body slid sideways into the girl beside me.
"Sel," she whispered. "Sel, we're here."
I knew where here was before the doors opened.
I could hear the guards' voices outside, clipped and sure of themselves.
They were the king's men, and the king only had one gate.
My eyes were swollen almost shut from the raid.
My mouth tasted of blood, and my wolf lay silent inside me.
The guards had forced wolfsbane down all of us on the road, and they had given me a double dose because I had bitten one of them.
The doors banged open.
Cold air and floodlights poured in.
"Out," a guard shouted. "Rogues on the ground, on your knees."
Guards dragged us off the truck bed one by one.
Two of them took me under the arms and dropped me on the gravel.
My ribs flared white.
I did not make a sound.
My father, Alaric, used to say a wolf who cried out in a fight got a second blow.
The girl landed next to me and wheezed.
Her name was Autumn, she was nineteen, and she had been on my road for four months.
"Breathe slow," I told her without moving my lips.
"I'm trying," she said.
"Try quieter."
A guard barked from somewhere above my head. "Eyes down. Nobody looks at the King."
The King.
I looked down at the gravel and counted the stones in front of my knees.
Boots came across the yard, a lot of them, steady and unhurried.
One pair stopped a few feet from me.
I kept my left hand shut in my lap.
I had kept it that way for three years, so long that my fingers did it on their own.
Through my swollen lids I saw a man in a dark grey suit with three men behind him.
He stood with his right hand open at his side.
There was a white line across the palm.
My stomach turned over.
"Is this all?" he said.
Four words, low and tired.
I knew that voice.
I had heard it once, three years ago, through a veil, saying a vow beside me.
Then my father had died that same night, and I had run.
My wolf stirred under the wolfsbane, just once, and I understood what she was doing.
She was calling him mate.
I bent my head lower so my hair fell across my face.
"Yes, my King," a guard said. "Fifteen from the Blackwater camp. No Ironcrest wolves among them that we can find."
My heart began to pound.
If he heard it, he would know something was wrong with the girl on the gravel.
I breathed in for four counts and out for four, the way my father taught me to hold still in a hunt.
The King did not look at me.
He looked down the line of kneeling wolves and his face stayed flat.
"Take them below," he said. "Question every one of them tonight."
Guards hauled people up and marched them toward a stair cut down into the stone.
"Autumn," I said.
She had gone grey and was clawing at her chest.
"Leave her," one of the guards said, and then lifted her anyway.
"She's got bad lungs," I said. "Don't throw her."
"On your feet, rogue."
A hand took me by the hair and another by the arm.
I was pulled up and shoved onto the stairs.
Every step jarred my broken ribs.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted fresh blood.
I would not give them the sound.
At the bottom the air stank of old fluid and wet iron.
The guard threw me into a cell, and my legs gave out on the cold concrete.
The door shut.
I lay with my face against the floor and listened to my own pulse until it slowed.
I had decided something on the stairs.
So I kept my mouth shut and my left hand closed.
Sorcha MacQuarrie had burned in a fire three years ago, as far as the whole kingdom knew, and she was going to stay dead.
Footsteps came back down the corridor, lighter than the guards'.
A key turned.
A man crouched in the doorway with a tin cup and a grey blanket.
He had sandy hair, freckles and a kind, worried face, and the Beta's badge on his jacket.
"Easy," he said. "I'm Alder. Drink this slowly."
He held the cup to my mouth himself.
The water was cold and tasted like a river.
"I'm sorry about the stairs," he said. "Some of the new guards forget we're not animals here. What's your name?"
"Sel," I said.
"Which road did you come in on, Sel?"
"Blackwater road."
"That's what the others said."
He draped the blanket across my shoulders and checked that it covered my hand.
I noticed his boots as he rose, because they were the only dirty thing about him.
They were caked with red clay up to the laces.
I was too tired to wonder where he had walked in it.
"Rest," he said. "Caspian does the questions in the morning, and he's fair."
He locked the door behind him.
Down the corridor I heard the King's voice reach the first cell.
"I'm looking for a woman who ran from Ironcrest the night of the fire," he said. "Dark hair. A scar on her left hand. Did any of you know her?"
I lay in the dark with my fist shut under the blanket.
He wasn't questioning rogues.
He was hunting me.
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