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Ithan’s latest audiomail had come only an hour ago, stirring her from the unsleeping stupor in which she’d spent the past six nights, staring at the dark ceiling of the hotel room she was sharing with her mother. Ignoring every call and message.
Ithan’s words had lingered, though, when she’d slipped into the hotel bathroom to listen.
Don’t come to the Sailing tomorrow. You’re not welcome there.
She’d listened to it over and over, the first words to echo in her silent head.
Her mother hadn’t woken from the bed beside hers when Bryce had exited the hotel room on Fae-soft feet, taking the service elevator and leaving through the unwatched alley door. She hadn’t left that room for six days, just sat staring vacantly at the floral hotel wallpaper. And now, with the seventh dawning … Only for this would she leave. Would she remember how to move her body, how to speak.
Danika’s Sailing would commence at dawn, and the Sailings for the rest of the pack would follow. Bryce would not be there to witness them. Even without the wolves banning her from it, she couldn’t have endured it. To see the black boat pushed from the dock, all that was left of Danika with it, her soul to be judged either worthy or unworthy of entering the sacred isle across the river.
There was only silence here. Silence and mist.
Was this death? Silence and fog?
Bryce ran her tongue over her dry, chapped lips. She did not remember the last time she’d drunk anything. Had a meal. Only her mother coaxing her to take a sip of water.
A light had gone out inside her. A light had been extinguished.
She might as well have been staring inside herself: Darkness. Silence. Mist.
Bryce lifted her head, peering up toward the carved bone gates, hewn from the ribs of a long-dead leviathan who’d prowled the deep seas of the north. The mist swirled tighter, the temperature dropping. Announcing the arrival of something ancient and terrible.
Bryce remained kneeling. Bowed her head.
She was not welcome at the Sailing. So she had come here to say goodbye. To give Danika this one last thing.
The creature that dwelt in the mist emerged, and even the river at her back trembled.
Bryce opened her eyes. And slowly lifted her gaze.
PART II
THE TRENCH
8
TWENTY-TWO MONTHS LATER
Bryce Quinlan stumbled from the White Raven’s bathroom, a lion shifter nuzzling her neck, his broad hands grabbing at her waist.
It was easily the best sex she’d had in three months. Maybe longer than that. Maybe she’d keep him for a while.
Maybe she should learn his name first. Not that it mattered. Her meeting was at the VIP bar across the club in … well, shit. Right now.
The beat of the music pounded against her bones, echoing off the carved pillars, an incessant summons that Bryce ignored, denied. Just as she had every day for the past two years.
“Let’s dance.” The golden-haired lion’s words rumbled against her ear as he gripped her hand to drag her toward the teeming throng on the ancient stones of the dance floor.
She planted her feet as firmly as her four-inch stilettos would allow. “No, thanks. I’ve got a business meeting.” Not a lie, though she would have turned him down regardless.
The corner of the lion’s lip twitched as he surveyed her short-as-sin black dress, the bare legs she’d had wrapped around his waist moments ago. Urd spare her, his cheekbones were unreal. So were those golden eyes, now narrowing in amusement. “You go to business meetings looking like that?”
She did when her boss’s clients insisted on meeting in a neutral space like the Raven, fearful of whatever monitoring or spells Jesiba had at the gallery.
Bryce never would have come here—had so rarely come back here at all—on her own. She’d been sipping sparkling water at the normal bar within the club, not the VIP one she was supposed to be sitting at on the mezzanine, when the lion approached her with that easy smile and those broad shoulders. She’d been in such need of a distraction from the tension building in her with each moment in here that she’d barely finished her glass before she’d dragged him into the bathroom. He’d been all too happy to oblige her.
Bryce said to the lion, “Thanks for the ride.” Whatever your name is.
