Page 23 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
For both of us.
Another pair of rough hands seizes me by the neck, choking off my air and lifting me up from the ground. My toes dangle, desperate and straining to find earth.
“Think very carefully about your next move,” warns the guard with his hands around my throat. The cold kiss of metal presses into the flesh at my neck.
A copper-haired guard silhouetted in the doorway takes a half step toward us, drawing out a paper scroll and shooting a dark look at Finn. “This arrest warrant only names one, but so much as awhisperand we can easily make it two.”
Conflict carves across Finn’s face.
Her hands tighten on the side of the table, an inch from her sword. But if she moves for it, if she attacks any of the gardai, then everything I risked for her was for nothing.
“Finn,” I plead, and our eyes meet across the room. There’s nothing left for me to say—no space for explanations or apologies. Just one word, and it shatters me.“Don’t.”
“Maeve,” Finn whispers, shame cracking her ragged voice. Her eyes flicker over the gardai, searching every one of their faces like she can mark each one in her mind.
I swallow a sob. “I love you.”
I hear dirt crunching and something shatter against the walls as the gardai haul me out of my home.
With a laugh, the one with his hands still fisting my hair kicks the door shut behind us. He hauls me over the dirt, over hard earth and sharp rocks scraping my bare ankles, my palms.
The world blurs. My eyes burn, and every breath escapes me too fast.
Like even the air in my lungs knows to flee.
The guard spits in the dirt beside a cloudy mass of brown and iron gray taking shape in front of me through the blurring tears, and throws me down.
“Get in,” he barks, then kicks me in the ribs.
My sides seize up, and I curl in on myself, my back finding the edge of a wheel yoke. Iron bars hardly big enough to fit a hand through rise above me, the cold metal so grim even the first thin haze of dawn refuses to stick.
Something splinters in my heart as I recognize what looms above me.
A prison cart.
With a grunt, the large guard jerks, and his boot finds my side, again and again. Pain explodes, and my vision flashes white. Hard fists dig into my arms and heave me up; the movement is sudden enough I feel my head lolling. I land in a mess of crushed straw and grime.
It smells like death.
The lock clicks behind me. A whip cracks. The cart jerks forward, rattling hard through dark and empty streets. My breaths come in shallow, rough gasps. My ribs scream when I try to gather myself, to push myself up, and I let myself collapse against the metal bars.
Each rock of the cart is agony, and when we hit the place where the streets become stone,thatis a whole new world of pain.
And to think, I was fool enough to let myself believe that I might get away with it.
That I could strike a bargain with the Whisperers, and thatno one would see me going to them for help. That they’d keep their word.
Whether that asshole turned me in himself, or let someone else do it for him, what happens next will be the same.
The cart keeps rocking, tilting uphill. Hollow dread roots down deep in my bones.
I count each second. Every heartbeat slipping away. I look up and find a faint hazy glow blurring and limning the passing rooftops as dawn rises—the last one I’ll ever see.
The farther we go, the less the sea scents the wind. The incline grows steeper beneath the cart, and stone walls already slick with the damp beads of mist rise up around me. A howling chill whips through the iron bars, and in a cruel twist, my body refuses to go numb.
Castle Mount looms at the top of the hill.
We pass inside a ring of defensive walls; black-and-crimson banners unfurling in the air snap harshly in the bitter wind. The scent of the air changes.
