Chapter 11: Tally Marks

Bram's POV

Crane and his daughter were gone, three SUVs lost in the hills, and every Alpha had sent riders after them.

Wynne asked to go back to the cabin before she asked for anything else.

I drove her myself.

Nobody argued, not the Alphas, not the old man with the white beard, not even Maeve.

Wynne sat in the passenger seat in her grandmother's green cloak, her bare wrists showing.

She did not say a word for the whole twelve miles.

I did not ask.

I had spent ten years not asking.

The logging road was the same, narrow and rutted.

When we came out into the clearing, the woodpile stood where it had always stood.

A scorch mark lay beside it where the table had been.

The cabin door hung open.

Smoke still stained the ceiling inside where the logs had burned.

Wynne walked in ahead of me and stood in the middle of the single room, and I stayed in the door.

It was smaller than I remembered.

I had seen it exactly once, from the road, on a winter night, and that time I had not looked.

There was a narrow bed with an iron frame, a sink, a stove, a shelf with three cups on it.

There was a bucket in the corner.

There was no mirror.

I looked at the wall by the bed because she was looking at it.

Someone had scratched the plaster with a spoon handle.

Short lines in rows of five, gouged deep, hundreds of them, in a block about the size of a door.

I stepped closer.

They went all the way to the floor.

"Seven hundred and thirty," Wynne said behind me, very quietly. "That's two years. Then I stopped."

"Why?"

"I stopped being able to count."

I put my hand against the plaster.

The scratches were rough under my palm.

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