Chapter 18: Not Forgiving You

Rowena did not say it.

She stood over Vivian with her jaws open and her whole weight on the girl's chest, and she looked up at the wolves on the rim.

Twenty Crowe cousins looked back.

Not one of them moved to help.

"Take her," Lachlan said from the ridge. "Bind her and keep her in the hall cellar. Nobody touches her."

Four wolves of the pack came down the quarry wall and hauled Vivian up by the arms.

She spat at Rowena's feet. She was still laughing when they took her out of the light.

The old hunting lodge stood four miles up the logging road, a long black shape against the trees.

Rowena took it in the wolf, at a dead run, with Lachlan's black wolf at her flank and thirty of the pack strung out behind them.

She smelled lamp oil from a mile off.

The door was barred. She hit it with her shoulder once and it split down the middle.

Inside, Orson stood in the hall with a torch in one fist and a can of oil at his boot.

Junie sat tied to a post in the corner with a rag in her mouth, wet through, her eyes enormous.

"Back," Orson said. "Back, or I drop it."

Rowena did not stop.

She went across the floor in two strides and took his forearm in her teeth. The torch went out of his hand and rolled, and Lachlan stamped it dead.

Orson screamed. She felt the bone give.

He threw himself sideways through the back window in a spray of glass, and she heard his boots hit the yard.

Lachlan went after him as far as the tree line and came back empty-handed.

"He had horses staged," he said, hard. "He's gone."

Rowena changed back in the middle of the floor, shaking, and Hester's blanket went around her shoulders from somewhere.

She knelt and pulled the rag out of Junie's mouth.

"You took your time," Junie said.

"I'm sorry."

"I bit him on the way in. Did you see? His ankle. I bit his ankle." Junie began to cry in great ugly gulps. "Ro, I thought you weren't coming."

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