Chapter 16: Cedric's POV

Cedric's POV

The Watch lived in eleven cottages along County Road 9, a mile outside the Redhollow wall.

I went to the first one at midnight with Flora's strength humming in my chest and my fists open.

A man answered the door in his shirtsleeves.

I had made him a Watchman myself, six years ago.

"Alpha," he said, and did not step aside.

"I'm not here to give an order," I said. "I'm here to tell you what I signed."

He looked over my shoulder at the dark road.

Then he let me in.

I stood in his kitchen with his wife's coffee going cold on the counter and laid two ration orders on his table, side by side.

"Which of these is my hand?" I asked.

He bent over them.

"The top one," he said. "The other loops its g's. I've seen that loop on the gate roster every week for a year."

"Whose roster?"

"The Beta's."

He stared at the table for a long time.

"My wife was in the kitchen last winter," he said. "She told me the Luna was thin. I said it was none of our business."

"It was mine," I said. "I'm the one who wasn't looking."

"What do you need?"

"Nothing yet. I need you to know."

He nodded slowly.

I went to the second cottage.

Then the third.

Some of them listened.

Some of them shut the door in my face, and one of them spat on my boots.

By the seventh house, the hum in my chest had begun to thin, and I understood what it meant.

She was a long way away, and I was running on what she had given me.

I thought of her palm over my heart.

I thought of the mark of her mouth on my chest, and of what she'd said in the dark with her head tucked under my chin: I haven't forgiven you.