Chapter 24: Every Bloodline

"You heard what?" I said.

"All of it." Sabrina turned the key ring in her fingers. "The lamp. The lodge. Bram's mother."

For the first time, her voice wasn't smooth.

"I'm not stupid, Mira. A man who burned his own wife won't spare his son's intended."

"So let me out."

"No." She smiled thinly. "Say at the Eclipse that you bewitched Bram with dragon glamour."

She leaned closer.

"Then I can say the Alpha is a grieving father and I saw nothing, and we all live."

I looked at her through the bars.

"You're asking me to lie for him."

"I'm asking you to be reasonable."

"I'll see you at the stone," I said.

Sabrina's smile died.

She dropped the keys on the floor outside my cell and walked away.

I never knew whether she meant me to pick them up.

I did not.

I was not going to leave until I could walk out in front of everyone.

The Eclipse Moon rose over a ring of standing stones on the highest hill, red-gold and enormous.

Four hundred people stood in the grass in the dark.

I saw wolves in their grey jackets, fae in pale coats, shadow-walkers in cloaks of their own deep shade.

And one empty carved chair, set a little apart from the others, with a dusty cushion on its seat.

"The dragons' seat," Posy had whispered on the way up, out of the shadow at my elbow.

"Nobody's sat in it for eleven years."

They had let me out of the cellar an hour before.

Lucan walked beside the guards in a long dark coat, smiling at the crowd.

Ilyan walked behind me, with a split lip.

Bram stood alone in the middle of the ring.

He was white, and a vein ticked at his temple.

He looked at me once, and I knew he was fighting with everything he had.

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