Chapter 7: Fix the Lie

Ronan's POV

Garth found me in the armory an hour after the doors closed on Brendan Wadsworth.

I was oiling a sword that didn't need it.

"You told a hundred people she'd been in your bed."

"Yes."

"She hasn't."

"No."

"So in three days a Council Reader arrives."

Garth leaned against the rack.

"Unless Hazel Bramley has your mark on her neck, we lose the eastern ridge, and she goes home to a father who's lied to her for five years."

He crossed his arms.

"Tell me you have a plan that isn't just glowering at the wall."

"I have a plan."

"What is it?"

"I'm working on it."

He folded his arms and waited.

Garth was the only man alive who could do that to me, because he'd been waiting beside me since we were seven.

"Say it," he said. "Say why you won't lift the gag. Not the version you tell the Seer."

I put the sword down.

"My mother was born in Silver Dawn," I said.

"I know that."

"She was twenty-two when my father met her at a Gathering."

"The bond hit them both in the middle of a dance."

"He brought her home, and in the first month she laughed in every room of the house."

I looked at my hands.

"By the sixth month she had stopped eating."

"By the ninth she couldn't leave the bed."

"My father sat with her every night."

"She kept telling him it was the bond, taking everything and giving nothing back."

"Ronan."

"She died eleven months after the mating. I was a baby in the next room."

"I don't remember her face. My father told me all of it, every year on her birthday, until I could say it back to him."

Garth was quiet for a long time.

"And Hazel's father," he said at last, "said you'd kill her."

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