Chapter 4: The Cell Next Door

Ilsa's POV

I woke on the stone floor in the dark with no idea how long I had been out.

I could remember being carried.

I could remember bruises on every inch of me, and the smell of rain on warm stone, close, and then going away.

He had stood at my door.

I had heard him breathe in.

If he had stepped through it, I would have been finished.

I lay still and took inventory.

Pinky crushed.

Ribs cracked on the left.

One eye swollen shut.

The wolfsbane still sat thick in my blood, and my wolf was a weight under my ribs that wouldn't answer.

I wore a single shirt, and the cold of the floor came straight through it.

I had put that shirt on in a hurry, the night of the raid, when I changed back from my wolf behind a boulder.

I should never have been at the border trade.

The Mother had told me so.

"You are too valuable," she had said, "and too easy to see."

But a child in our camp had a fever that wouldn't break, and the medicine was across the border.

So I went.

Now I was in the one building in the world I had spent three years avoiding.

I rolled slowly onto my left side.

Somebody scraped something along the bars of the cell beside mine.

"Hey," a voice whispered.

"Hey. You alive?"

I turned my head toward the sound.

A girl lay pressed against the bars with her arm stretched through them.

She couldn't have been more than sixteen.