Chapter 9: What You Said the Night Before

The ache woke Rowena at four in the morning.

It was a slow, steady drag, and it pulled toward the mountain.

She pulled on boots and followed it, because the alternative was lying there and hating it.

Lachlan was not in his truck. The seat was empty and the door hung open.

She walked the road to the clearing outside the pack's gate, where the bonfire had burned.

The ash was cold now. The flat stone sat in the middle of its ring of monkshood.

She sat down on it and put her palm against the old rock, the way she had two nights ago.

It was warm. The sun was not up, and the rock was warm.

She was still thinking about that when she heard boots on the path.

Lachlan came out of the trees with his hand pressed to his thigh.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing, twenty yards off, and did not come closer.

His eyes went to her and stayed there.

"Orson shut the Book on me," he said. "That's all I'm allowed to tell you."

"We're not talking about it, remember? That was the rule."

"I wasn't talking about it."

"You were talking about something."

His mouth tightened. He took one step, then another, and the ache in her chest let go by degrees.

He stopped an arm's length away, as he had at the fire.

It was a bad place to stop.

Rowena looked at him and remembered it all at once.

"You said something to me the night before," she said.

"I said a lot of things."

"You came to the clinic door. You said, Tomorrow I want to ask you something."

His face did not change. His hands closed.

"I thought about it all day," she said. "I wore my good dress."

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