Chapter 5: The Tea

Aldric's POV

A Greywater rider reached my study at midnight with a hunter's sworn words on a strip of paper.

The Luna's own word. The pup breathing, the carrier not.

I read it twice and gave it to my Beta, who read it and went pale.

"Is it true?" I asked him.

He looked at the floor. "The rider who hired them wore the Luna's ring, Alpha. I saw it leave the gate."

"And you said nothing."

"You were on your knees in the courtyard. I thought it was grief."

"It was grief." My voice was not steady. "I want that rider found by morning."

He left, and I heard his boots stop outside the Luna's door, then turn away from it.

For seven years every man in this house had gone to her first. Tonight he had not.

I sat alone with the lamp and a cold pain in my chest where the bond used to be.

The bond had lit the first time Morven looked at me, and I had never once known what to do with it.

The door opened. Delphine came in with a tray.

She wore her night robe and her hair down, and she looked exactly like what she was to the pack: the kindest woman in Duskmoor.

"You haven't slept," she said. "I made your tea."

It was what she had done every night since the war.

She set the cup by my hand and rested her fingers on my shoulder.

"I'm so sorry about Morven," she said. "She's confused, and I think it's the milk fever. We'll get her back, Aldric. Linnet needs her mother."

"Her mother," I said.

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