A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Scar

I read the line a third time, and it did not change.

Cast out of the house for blood-theft of an unwoken ward.

I was the ward.

I had been unwoken until the night I turned fourteen, and I knew what blood-theft meant in the law of the Urekai.

It meant a person had been fed on, and the person who fed was the thief.

It meant the page said she had stolen from me.

I went down the stairs with the paper in my hand, and Ysmay came behind me and did not say a word.

Lenore was in the study, at the desk, with the ledgers open and the morning light on her hair.

She looked up when I came in.

She saw the page in my hand, and the color left her face.

"Where did you get that?"

"Ysmay had it. She took it from the Rooke register the night she carried me out of your father's house."

Lenore shut her eyes.

"Read it," I said. "Read it aloud."

"I know what it says, Dav."

"Then tell me what it means."

She did not answer.

I laid the page on the desk between us, flat, with my hand on it.

"Blood-theft means someone fed. You were fourteen, and so was I. I woke into my hunger that spring. I remember a night in the cellar, and I remember being sick, and I remember waking up in Ysmay's kitchen with a fever." My voice was rough. "I remember being told you were gone."

"You weren't told wrong," Lenore said, in a very small voice. "I was gone."

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