Chapter 16: Six Years Quiet

Elias's POV

The chest sat under my bunk in the barracks, and it had been locked for six years.

I knelt in front of it with my stitches pulling and the key in my fist.

The patrol had gone quiet in the mess hall.

They knew where I was and what I was doing, and not one of them came to the door.

I opened the lid.

The cup lay on a folded cloth.

It was white with a blue rim, a small thing, the kind that came on the Luna's night tray.

A brown stain had dried at the bottom, and it still smelled of honey.

Under the honey was something bitter that I had never been able to forget.

I picked it up and held it.

On the fourth night of her fever, I carried the tray out of her room myself, because the maid was asleep on her feet.

The tea had been cold, and Mara had not touched it.

I put my nose over the cup, out of habit, because a wolf's nose does not rest.

It was wolfsbane.

It was only a trace, boiled down into the valerian and sweetened to hide it, but I knew that sour edge.

My uncle had died of it in a rogue winter, and I was ten years old when I smelled it on his lips.

I stood in the corridor with the cup in my hands and understood two things.

Somebody in the Holt house had been feeding my Alpha's wife a little poison every night for four nights.

And the fever, which no healer could break, would break the moment she stopped drinking.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Six Years As His Luna. He Only Wanted My Sister from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.