One Minute Younger Always Second Best Until I Walked Out the Door novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Map Room

"It could have been lent," Jonas said.

It was past three in the morning, and we were still in the kitchen with the broken mug swept into a corner.

He had a clean bandage around his forearm.

The silver blade lay on the table between us.

"Three keys," I said. "My father is sick in bed, Orrin is Beta, and Cassia runs the stores."

"Which of them took a silver knife out of a locked cabinet and gave it to a hunter?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then you don't say it yet. Not to me, not to anyone." He turned the blade over with one finger. "If you accuse her tonight, she cries in front of your whole pack, and you're the rogue who lied."

I hated that he was right.

I hated more that he had understood her in one morning.

"What do I do instead?"

"What you do best," he said. "You draw."

So I drew.

The war room was on the lodge's second floor, a long bare room with one table and a window that looked north.

Jonas laid out every old patrol sheet Black Creek had.

They were awful.

The scale was wrong on half of them, and one ridge was simply missing.

"Who made these?"

"We all did, a little at a time."

"This is your whole border?"

"Yes."

I took off my coat and rolled up my sleeves.

By dawn I had the first sheet clean, with the high roads marked and the three fords numbered in order of how fast they flood.

By the second night I had pinned the whole northern line to the wall.

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