Chapter 22: The Cost

Lucan's POV

I could not sleep, so I sat on the edge of the terrace with my feet over the dark and waited for the dawn.

Below me the mountain was silver with frost.

Behind me, through the open glass, Orla slept sprawled across my bed with one hand flung out.

She had stopped sleeping curled up in a ball around the third night.

Tobias came out in his shirtsleeves with two mugs and sat down on the step.

"You're brooding," he said.

"I'm thinking."

"You do it with your whole face." He handed me a mug. "Have you told her?"

"Told her what?"

"The true mark. What it costs."

I turned the mug in my hands.

"No."

"She'll take it tomorrow, if you ask her. She looks at you like you hung the moon."

"I know."

"Then say it before you ask."

He went back in, and I sat with the coffee going cold.

I did not need the old book to tell me the cost.

A false claim had killed my mother when I was a boy, and I had read every book on bonds afterward, true ones included.

A true mark is a thread between two people, and cutting it takes the other person down too.

I had hunted the old books for a way around it.

There was none.

If Orla died, I would die by the next full moon.

If I died, so would she.

And there was a second price, smaller and worse.

A true mark lets each of them feel the other's wolf, all of it, with no door to close.

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