Everyone Who Entered the Forbidden Room Wanted Me Dead novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: The Terms Break

Tobias spread the map on the foot of the bed, and Elias sat up against the pillows to read it.

I put on my trousers while they bent over it.

It was a hand-drawn chart of the whole territory, with eight small crosses drawn in pencil along the border.

"Border stones," Tobias said. "I walked the line from midnight until dawn, as a tracker does."

He tapped four of the crosses with a scarred finger.

"These four have the same cut as the one on the north road. Fresh chisel work, deep as a thumb."

"Sabine," I said.

"Or whoever she paid. She had a month, maybe more, and the pack was looking at you."

Elias read his lips and wrote on the back of my hand.

I read it with my fingertips: Stone dying.

"It's cracking," Tobias said. He looked at me. "Four of the eight are cut, and the wards between them are failing. Every wolf in the territory is weaker today than yesterday. The healer says three hunters are feverish already."

"The fever's coming from the stone."

"It is."

I thought of the wall, and the lines about the anchor.

"I'm inside the border," I said. "I'm alive. It should hold."

"It holds if the pack knows you're the anchor," Tobias said slowly. "Your father kept you as a prisoner and a villain. You've been the anchor for twenty-four years, and nobody ever bound it to you. The stone needs the Alpha's seat to say so out loud."

"Say what?"

"That you're the heir. That the blood on the stone is yours."

Elias made a sharp small sound, and I knew he had read it.

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