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Unmade whatever plan she’d been making for us?
“Yes,” I said, grabbing last night’s towel and scrubbing my face with a clean bit. “My plans will just have to wait.”
Using such a common tactic as passive wordplay to get my point across made me feel silly and shrewish. Neither served to improve my mood.
“It’s a trap,” Sal said, sinking down on the tub’s edge.
I paused my ablutions. “What’s that?”
“It’s a trap.” Her large, dark eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “She doesn’t want your brother, she wants you.”
An army of insects marched down my spine. “How do you know that?” I asked.
Sal blew out a breath, deflating her shoulders. “Because I was supposed to bring you to her.”
Cold seeped into my blood from the stone floor beneath my feet.
“So that’s the kind of work you do.” I sagged back against the table with the wash basin. “You were never going to help me get to my ship at all.
“Not in the beginning, no,” she admitted. “But after last night—”
“Oh, please,” I spat. “Next, you’ll be telling me you meant what you said even though you had no intention of seeing it through.”
Sal stood up. “I did mean what I said, Kat. All of it. But I also knew it was the best way to get you on that ship so you’d be safe.”
I whirled on her, my temper rising like the tide. “How dare you speak of women being free when you held me unwitting captive through outright deception?”
Sal stared at the old stone floor like it might hold the answers to the Universe’s riddles, offering no defense.
I grabbed the rest of my things and balled them up beneath my arm as I shoved my feet into boots. “You’d have thought I could smell a rat after a hundred years.” I shook my head in disgust. “Some wolf I am.”
“You don’t have to go, Kat,” Sal said, touching my arm.
“It’s family,” I said, shrugging her off. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Chapter Four
Fucking cottages.
With their incessant need for coziness, the windows always invariably ended up being ridiculously small and almost impossible to see anything through.
And the flame-haired witch’s stunk.
Stunk like a wet foot left too long in a boot. I blamed this fact alone for my inability to scent my brother despite the indelible genetic marker stamped on my very marrow.
As I hunkered below the ill-proportioned window, even the very walls seemed to sweat, filming my paws with oil every time I braced against it to glimpse the goings on.
And the goings-on were, in a word, pathetic.
Suspended from the ceiling beam of the disheveled hovel choking with mewling felines, an oversized cage containing my brother swung in a slow circle, turning him like a Yuletide goose.
I’d glimpse his lovelorn face with every rotation and lose it again as the cage turned.
Though I couldn’t see the cursed wench, I tracked her position by his eyes as they followed her.
At last, a slim white hand came into view, followed by the rest of her.
Naked.
