Everyone Who Entered the Forbidden Room Wanted Me Dead novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Border Stone

Past the border stone Bryn learns the guard who carried her is deaf and was hired to keep her inside, then four wolves attack and Tobias's eyes clear for one breath: run.

The howl behind me did not stop, and neither did the pain.

It started in my chest and ran down both arms until my fingers curled.

I went down on my knees in the gravel one step past the border stone.

Every time I tried to stand, the howl rose and my ribs locked.

I had never crossed that line in my life.

Father said it was the pack's law, and I had believed him.

Boots came down the drive behind me.

I turned my head and saw Elias Rook walking out of the gate with his jacket open and no weapon.

"Go back," I said. "He'll send you after me."

He kept walking.

I said it again, louder, and he stopped in front of me and crouched.

He did not look at my eyes.

He looked at my mouth.

"I can't hear you if you turn your face," he said.

His voice was flat and a little too loud.

"You're deaf," I said, and my chest cracked again on the last word.

"Since I was six. Face me."

I faced him.

"Who hired you?" I asked.

"Your father. Three months ago."

"To do what?"

"Keep you inside the border."

I laughed, and it came out as a cough.

"Then you opened that gate for the wrong reason."

"He never said I couldn't open it."

That told me nothing, and I told him so.

He shrugged one shoulder.

"You can't stand," he said. "Whatever the stone is doing to you, it will only stop if you're far enough away."

"You don't know that."

"I watched a hunter drag a runaway back across it last month. He was screaming too."

I had never heard about that hunter.

I wondered how many things I had never heard.

Elias put an arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifted me off the gravel.

"Put me down."

"Tell me in ten steps if you still want that."

I told him at step three.

He did not put me down, and by step ten the pain in my arms had eased a little.

He carried me down a bank and into a dry gully, where the cedars closed over us and the road went out of sight.

He set me against a rock.

My throat was swelling, and I could feel every finger Tobias had pressed into it.

"He wasn't himself," I said. "Tobias. He wasn't."

Elias watched my mouth and said nothing.

Then his head turned sharply toward the road, and a second later I heard it too.

Paws on gravel, many of them, coming fast.

"Stay down," he said.

Four wolves came over the bank.

The three behind were hunters I had known since I was a girl, and none of them had ever said my name kindly.

The one in front was a big sandy wolf with green eyes.

Tobias.

He had shifted, and he had shaken off the cells somehow, or someone had let him out.

His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his eyes were flat again.

I could feel the mate bond pulling at my ribs, and under the pain I was terrified of him and of how much I still wanted him to be himself.

Elias stepped in front of me.

He picked a fallen branch off the ground, as long as his arm and thick as a wrist.

"Four of you," he said, loud and flat. "One of me. Go home."

None of them could have known he couldn't hear the answer.

The first hunter went for his legs.

Elias brought the branch down on its skull and the wolf dropped without a sound.

The second came in from the side.

Elias drove an elbow into its jaw, spun, and swung the branch into the third wolf's ribs, and I heard something crack.

He did not make a sound himself, even when the second wolf's teeth raked his forearm and the blood ran down to his wrist.

Tobias had not moved.

He stood at the lip of the gully with his head low, watching me past Elias's shoulder.

Then his wolf's eyes changed.

The green came back into them, clear and sharp and frightened, for one breath.

His voice came down the mate link, small and ragged.

Run, Bryn.

Then the flatness poured back over his eyes, and his lips peeled back, and he sprang.

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