My Pack Killed My Daughter While I Served the Moon Goddess novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Honey in the Tea

Alone in the silver cell, Cora drops her kindness and admits she poured the wolfsbane. Emmett learns about the pup, and the Great Elder hears it all. Then three Alphas arrive at the gate.

They put me in the silver cell under the feast hall.

It had one barred window, a stone bench and a ring in the wall for chains.

The guards locked the door and left me with the dark.

The silver around my wrists still smoked.

I sat on the bench and looked at my hands.

Footsteps came down the stairs a long time later.

A key turned.

Cora came in with a lantern in one hand and a covered bowl in the other.

She wore the yellow dress still, and the flower wreath was crooked.

"I told the guard I'd bring you something hot," she said. "Uncle said I could."

She sent him away with a nod, and I heard his boots climb the stairs.

She set the bowl on the bench beside me.

It was broth, with steam coming off it.

"I brought you broth," Cora said. "I didn't bring tea. You didn't like the tea."

Her voice was just as soft as it had been in the hall.

Then she turned and slid the bolt on the inside of the door.

I looked at the bolt, and I looked at her.

"What are you doing?"

She came back and sat down on the bench, close enough that our knees touched.

All the sweetness went out of her face, and what was under it was tired and almost bored.

"You really weren't supposed to come down," she said. "Another few months and it would have been over."

"What would have been over?"

"Everything." She picked at a petal on her wreath. "Tilda would have been gone, and you'd have come home to a clean grave and a Luna who'd already been named."

My mouth went dry.

"You did this."

"I did the tea," Cora said. "Emmett couldn't. He cried."

"She was your cousin."

"She was in my way."

She said it plainly, with no heat at all.

"I used honey so she wouldn't taste the bitter," she said. "I held the cup for her myself every night for a week, because she was too weak to lift it."

"She thanked me every time."

I stood up, and the chain bit into my wrists, and I could not reach her.

Cora did not even flinch.

"Midsummer," she said. "That's when I'll be Luna. Uncle already promised it."

"The Alpha doesn't choose a Luna," I said. "The Goddess does."

Cora smiled for the first time, a small bright one.

"Then it's a good thing you broke the pillar, isn't it? Now nobody can ask her."

She patted my hand where it hung in the chain.

"Eat your broth, Aunt Linnea."

She drew the bolt, and the door swung open, and the lantern went out into the corridor with her.

Somebody was standing in the dark beyond it.

Emmett leaned on the wall by the stairs, with his shirt open at the throat and a wine cup in his fist.

He looked at me through the open door.

"She was dying anyway," he said.

His voice was thick.

"The healer said so. She stopped eating in the winter. I couldn't make her."

"You locked her in the cellar."

"The Alpha said it was for her own good."

"He said she'd hurt herself, and I was to keep the key."

"Emmett." I said his name slowly. "She was carrying your pup."

His face did something I had never seen on it before.

"No," he said.

"Four months."

"She never told me." He shook his head, and the cup shook with it. "She never said anything. Cora said she couldn't."

"Cora said."

"She said Tilda couldn't carry. She said Tilda was empty."

"Your mate was starving in a cellar with your child inside her, and you believed Cora."

He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor with his hands over his face.

I did not feel sorry for him.

Beyond him, in the shadow at the foot of the stairs, a lantern stood on the flagstones.

A pair of old boots stood beside it.

The Great Elder had been there the whole time.

He had heard every word.

His lantern did not move, and neither did he.

Then, up on the hill, a horn blew.

It was a deep one, and it blew three times.

The Great Elder lifted his head.

"Those are not our horns," he said.

Boots rang overhead, and the whole hall went loud.

A door slammed, and a voice I did not know called out in the courtyard, calm and carrying.

"Open the gate to Ashmoor."

Emmett scrambled up and ran.

Footsteps came down the stairs, unhurried, and the guard's keys rattled.

A man ducked under the lintel into the corridor.

He was tall and dark-haired with gray at his temples, and he wore a long wool coat wet with snow.

He did not look at the Great Elder, and he did not look at the chain.

He looked at my hands, where the silver light moved under the skin.

"I'm Rowan Breckenridge," he said. "I'm the Alpha of Ashmoor."

His voice was quiet.

"The sky over your mountain lit up the whole valley tonight. Three Alphas saw it from three borders."

"The Goddess has chosen someone to speak for her."

He looked at the smoking chain around my wrists.

"And Gareth Hargrave has just chained her."

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