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The Rook & His Queen
He was the rook.
She was the queen.
And there was nothing else that mattered. She had to be saved. She didn’t know this—she thought the Queen had been someone else.
And he had to be the rook: the piece that moved in unexpected ways.
And the lying swindler who deceived everyone.
He had failed to protect her. He had failed his pack.
He was back to where he had begun: a lone wolf, digging for rats under dumpsters and behind walls.
A ratter. A ratter under his bespoke suits and custom shirts.
Nothing mattered now but defeating Alan in July. If he failed, the Queen would be lost and the game over. Winter wouldtrulydie.
And how would heeverface her when they met again at the River, after she had shared a lifetime with another wolf, because he had failed to save her?
No pain. No difficulty. No lie was too large, no truth too difficult, no rat too hideous.
He pulled his emotions inward, peeling them off his insides like peeling film off glass, wadded them up, and put them away in a small, dark corner of his soul. He summoned cold and frost to himself instead, drawing inward a chill of uncaring, unthinking resolve.
These wolves in these barracks? They were obstacles. They were training tools.
And he would take from this place everything it had to give. He would wring it dry and absorb all of the blood into himself.
He wouldnotfail his mate, or his pack, or his parents.
First Beta Henri pushed open the door to the long, low barracks hidden in the Blue Ridge mountains, twenty miles from AmberHowl’s heart, and a few miles from the Apharia Spread property line. The barracks themselves were a cluster of three long, low wood cabin structures tucked down in the trees, like a deranged wolf summer camp. Not that he had ever been to sleep-away summer camp. His mother had never been able to afford it, and then his father had not trusted him to not solve social problems with his claws.
Henri gestured with a jerk of his head to enter the building.
It was warm and smelled of bachelor male wolf. Under that was a thousand other scents that came with warm bodies being packed into the same space. He disregarded all of it as unimportant. None of it was. What was important was the location of each window, each door, each bed, and each wolf.
Twelve beds. Ten wolves. One trunk at the foot of each bed. Six windows, no curtains. Two doors, no deadbolts or locks. Ten-foot ceiling, exposed beams, three lights, one set of switches. Three power outlets. One small closet door, closed. One board game on the floor. One puzzle. No tables. No chairs. No dressers, no boxes, nothing on the bare walls. Approximate age of wolves: late teens to twenty-five.
All the wolves present dropped what they were doing and gathered up into two loose lines, nonplussed by their arrival.
Henri slid his eyes to Sterling. He grunted.
They did not need words. Henri knew what he was here for.
Henri turned back to the wolves. “This new wolf will be with us until July. He is here by Alpha Demetrius and Luna Marcella’s word. He will be training with us. After July, he will either be leaving or he will be dead.”
“I will be leaving, and Alan will be dead,” Sterling said, voice low and cold, examining each of his new den-mates for weakness or threat.
Henri made another grunting sound, something between a snort and acknowledgement. Henri did not care—his scent said that much. He didn’t like any of this, but he had stopped short of being insulting, while maintaining a thorny level of compassion for the situation.
Sterling had restrained himself from asking a single question about Searle. He had not been allowed to see Winter, and had heard nothing about her condition since he had left Clare save she was out of mortal danger.
The grip on his soul, the feeling of her sliding away, had eased.
Now there was an aching, ravaging guilt and loss worse than any hunger he had ever endured. A bitter, bloody taste of failure and self-hatred.
He had been taken to some other AmberHowl safehouse the past two weeks while his injuries had healed. He had been left alone except for the presence of AmberHowl guards that had made sure he remained in his crate. Once the haze of drugs and sedatives had cleared, the real pain, the unrelenting, agonizing pain of being in a downpour of failure and rage and grief, had begun.
