Chapter 5: Stitches

Fenna gave me the room at the end of the upstairs hall, the one with a lock on the inside.

I didn't sleep.

I lay on top of the quilt with my boots on and went over it again.

Odette had known the gate, the road and the hour.

I had told no one, and Torin said his scouts had told no one.

So someone at Brask Ridge had talked, or someone in my family had been following me for longer than I wanted to think.

Neither answer let me close my eyes.

At four in the morning I came downstairs in borrowed flannel pajamas, because the cut on my palm had opened again and bled through the bandage.

Torin was at the kitchen table with a cold mug and a pile of maps.

He stood up when I came in.

"Sit," he said. "I'll get Fenna."

"Don't. She's been up for two days."

"Then I'll do it."

"Can you stitch?"

"I've stitched a pack's worth of Beta." He was already pulling the kit out of the cupboard. "I'm not good at it. I'm fast."

"That's what a vet tech wants to hear."

"You're a vet tech?"

"I'm the best vet tech Harlan Ridge ever had," I said, and then I stopped, because the sentence had a hole in it.

*Had.* I had been the best, and now nobody knew my name.

Torin set a chair for me under the lamp and sat across from me with my hand in both of his.

His hands were enormous.

They were warm and dry and rough at the thumbs, and he held my wrist with great care.

"This will sting," he said.

"I know."

He cleaned it.

I did not make a sound.

He threaded the needle.

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