I Hid My Sister's Killer, So the Alpha Poured Truth Down My Throat novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Silver Cell

Her mother slaps her for slandering the Alpha who buried Nessa, and Kellan comes alone in the night, asks about the creek and hears about the anklet in his father's locked drawer.

I woke on a stone shelf in the silver cell with my wrists wrapped in wet cloth.

Someone had taken the chains off.

The bars were silver, and the cold of them reached me from three feet away.

My wolf did not even flinch at it.

She was too far down in me to feel anything.

"Drink," said Hester.

She sat on a stool outside the bars with a flask and a lantern, and her braid had come half undone.

"It's foul," she said. "It will slow the monkshood. It will not stop it."

I drank it, and it was worse than foul.

"The guards are new," she said, low. "Osric's. He changed the whole watch before the hall had emptied."

"Is that strange?"

"He's the Beta. It's his right." She pushed her glasses up. "It's also very quick."

Then she looked at the door at the end of the passage.

"Your mother is here. Ten minutes, I told them."

She left me the flask and went.

My mother came down the steps by herself.

She was smaller than I remembered, with grey in the hair she used to keep brown for the Harvest dinner.

She stopped at the bars and did not look at my face.

She looked at my wrist, bare where the cord had been.

Then she slapped me, through the bars, so hard my head rang.

"Take it back," she said.

"Mother."

"Aldric buried my daughter. He stood at her grave in the rain and he wept." Her voice shook. "You will not put his name in your mouth."

"It was his name that came out, not mine." My cheek was burning. "You heard it. The draught can't lie."

"Then say it was bent."

"It wasn't."

"Say it!"

"You cut my name out of the family tree with a kitchen knife," I said. "And now you've walked down here to slap me for telling the truth?"

She flinched.

"Who else did you tell?" she whispered.

I stared at her.

"Nobody," I said. "Nobody, in fifteen years. Who would I tell?"

Her shoulders dropped.

She looked ten years younger afterward.

"Good," she said.

I thought she meant good for the dead man's name.

I was too tired to think anything else.

She left without touching me, and my father never came at all.

The lantern burned down.

I lay on the shelf, breathing shallowly against the taste of copper.

Somewhere above me the Moot Hall doors banged and men shouted.

Then there was quiet for a long while.

Past midnight, boots came down the steps.

They were not guards.

A guard walked loud.

These were slow, and one of them stopped on every stair.

Kellan stood in the lantern light on the other side of the bars.

He had taken off his father's coat.

He wore a plain grey shirt, and it was torn at the collar where his own fist had pulled it.

"I sent the watch up," he said. "They'll stay up."

I said nothing.

"I need to ask you some things."

"Then ask."

He sat down on the stone floor with his back against the opposite wall, three feet from the bars.

He had been a boy who could never sit still.

"Where did you find her?"

The last of the draught in my blood answered for me before I could decide to.

"At the bend in the creek, under the willow. She was on her back in the shallows. Her left hand was open."

His jaw worked.

"What did he say first?"

"He said, 'Brigid, hand me the towel.' There was a towel on the rock."

Kellan shut his eyes.

"What did he take?"

"Her anklet. The silver one I bought her at the fair. He picked it off the bank and put it in his left coat pocket."

"You saw that."

"I watched him do it."

I heard him swallow.

"Why would he keep it?"

"He kept everything in the locked drawer left of his desk," I said. "You told me that when you were eight. You said it was where he hid the good sweets."

Kellan opened his eyes.

For a moment I thought he would say something terrible, or something kind, and I did not want either.

"You could have told me when I got older," he said.

"You adored him."

"I would have believed you."

"You were thirteen, and then you were sixteen, and then you were twenty, and you never stopped adoring him." I turned my face away. "I wasn't going to be the one who took a boy's father from him and put the boy in the creek after him."

He got to his feet slowly.

I heard his boots on the stone, one step toward the bars, and then none.

"Left of the desk," he said.

"Left drawer."

He turned and walked to the steps.

Then he ran.

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