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“I needed to leave her when I fled,” Davina’s voice became impossibly quieter. “And I couldn’t—I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing. My neighbor’s daughter had always liked her, so I left her on their house steps the night I left with a note that I was moving out of Ayr and towards our northern territory. I watched from behind a tree. Thank Goddess, they took her in right away.” Davina swallowed hard, and her hardened gaze fixated on the bak. “I still hear her crying after I put her in her crate, not wanting me to leave. I kept apologizing, even if she didn’t understand it. She only understood I was abandoning her all over again. Taking her with me through the rogue lands, though, wouldn’t be fair. It would’ve been too much.” She cleared what may have been a sob from her throat and leaned into Rhydian’s touch at her back. A quiet anger had settled on his brother’s face—not for her actions but for all she’d undergone. Davina had always said it was a miracle that she’d found him, that she’d found a family with them.
One of Davina’s hands shot up to swipe a tear away with its heel while the other continued stroking the pup’s ears. It had since cocooned in her lap, tucked with Isla’s sweater.
When Davina’s eyes collided with Kai’s, her typical aurous and bubbly persona had entirely fallen away; only the coarse shell of a haunted survivor remained. “If Locke figured out who fled here, would he be able to take us back?”
“I wouldn’t let him.” Kai’s words were quick and dark with lethal promise. “Not a chance in hell.”
“Even if it meant war?” Davina inhaled and exhaled deeply as if the thought shook her.
It shook Kai, too.
He hesitated to sayyes,if only because of how powerful and catastrophic the word was. How much more daunting it felt as it became more plausible, probable.
There is no peace while you exist.
“Every wolf within these borders are my people,” he said. “If he touched any one of you, I wouldn’t hold back.”
A silent understanding passed them all, and Kai felt the weight of what he’d done. Knew they all inferred the lengths he’d go, what he was capable of.
Rhydian slid down from his seat to the floor beside her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, hugging her to him. “We won’t let anything happen to you—I won’t—I promise.”
Davina’s eyes gleamed, and she nodded.
When Rhydian leaned in to kiss her, Kai averted his eyes, then pushed up from his armchair, catching the pup open one of his closed eyes to check if Kai was preparing to leavehim. He put up a hand, telling him to settle. Seeming to understand, the pup went back to sleeping.
Kai felt a slight smile tug at his lips and knew that if Isla were here, the small action, how peaceful the pup looked as it slumbered, would’ve had her beaming. His hand opened and closed in an echo of a touch that wasn’t there, missing her soothing presence.
Two days. Just two days.She was going to be sick of him when she got back.
When he pulled out a seat at the study table, he realized Jonah had been watching him.
Kai lowered himself into the chair. “Isla never got to tell me what you two talked about this morning.”
“Well, she never mentionedhim.” Jonah nodded towards the pup in Davina’s lap and then to the spread of wares on the table. “We did talk about all of this. Same old, same old. Though she says she feels like the dagger’s broken.”
Kai observed the finely worked blade, his brows buckling as that essence seemed to tuck tighter inside himself. “How?”
“She just said it feels broken,” Jonah repeated exasperatedly. “And then she told me about her dreams.” His eyes flared wide at that. A ‘what the hell are those supposed to be?’
Kai’s eyes dropped to the artwork of the white-haired woman. For a heartbeat, Kai swore the answer to who she was lingered right on the cusp of his mind. “And you think it’sactuallyher, whoever this woman is, trying to talk to her?”
Jonah nodded tentatively. “My theory right now is she’s a priestess.”
Kai pursed his lips. No, that felt wrong.
Before he could say anything, though, Jonah asked, “Do you know where your father’s journals are? His personal accounts.”
Kai snapped his eyes up to meet his, feeling like he had punched a hole into his chest and squeezed his heart. Jonah shifted his focus back to his mapping, seeming to know Kai hated the vulnerability slashing across his own face.
He wished his voice hadn’t sounded so damn vacant. “No, I don’t.”
He should’ve known, though, shouldn’t he? So had been the tradition for the newly anointed alpha to study the wisdom of their predecessor. Kai technically should’ve started keeping his own records.
“You didn’t come across anything in the old archives when you were down there?” The catacomb-like cavern beneath the hall held some of their oldest books.
Jonah shook his head.
“Why do you want them?”
