Chapter 6 — Blood on the Ridge###Torin
928 Words
The bolt came out of the headboard clean, no barbs, no signature carving — deliberately anonymous, which told me more than a signature would have. Amateurs left marks because they wanted credit. Whoever put this through my wife's window wanted a body, not a reputation.
"Duskrail fletching," Callan said, turning it over in gloved hands in the grey light before dawn, crouched by the shattered window with the kind of focus he only brought to things that scared him. "This is club-made. Whoever fired this either trained here or stole from someone who did."
"Or was given it." I kept my voice level for Bri's sake, though she'd finally stopped shaking twenty minutes ago and gone still in the way that worried me more than the shaking had — the stillness of someone doing math on how unsafe her own life had just become. "Nobody outside this compound gets club fletching, Callan. Not vendors, not rivals. It doesn't leave these walls."
"Which means it came from inside them." He set the bolt down like it had personally offended him. "I'll run the tracking. Every batch gets logged to whoever draws it from the armory. Give me until morning."
"You have until morning." I looked past him to Bri, curled in the room's one undamaged armchair with a blanket someone had thrown over her shoulders sometime in the last hour, watching the two of us discuss her almost-murder like a supply chain problem because it was easier than the alternative. "Bri."
"I'm fine." The lie again, the same reflex I was starting to recognize as armor rather than dishonesty — a thing she'd built so early and so thoroughly that even now, glass still glittering in her hair, some part of her believed staying calm was the only currency she had left to offer a room.
"You're not, and you don't have to be." I crossed the room and crouched in front of her chair, close enough that Callan discreetly found something else to examine near the window. "Somebody in my own compound just tried to put a bolt through your chest. You're allowed to not be fine about that."
Something in her face cracked, just slightly, just for a second — and then she breathed it back down, the way I imagined she'd been doing since she was small enough to first hear the word Broken and decide it was safer to agree with it than fight it. "If I fall apart, I stop being useful to figure this out. I'd rather be useful."
"You're not a resource, Bri." The words came out sharper than I meant them, frustration at the wrong target, and I made myself gentle the next ones. "You're my wife. Whatever either of us thought that meant three days ago, it means somebody just tried to kill you under my roof, and I intend to find out who before they get a second attempt."
Callan found me in my study past midnight, the tracking ledger open under his arm and an expression I didn't like on a man who rarely showed one at all.
"The batch traces to the east armory." He set the ledger on my desk, finger against a line of names. "Signed out three weeks ago. Before the marriage was even finalized, Torin. Before anyone outside the inner circle knew Bri Locke's name at all."
Three weeks. Long enough to plan, not react. Whoever wanted her dead hadn't been surprised by what happened at the altar — they'd been prepared for it, or something like it, well before the wedding ever took place.
"Who signed for it."
Callan hesitated, and that hesitation told me everything the ledger hadn't. "Officially, one of Halden's men. Unofficially, Torin—" He met my eyes, grim. "Your uncle doesn't sign for armory stock personally. He never has. But his men don't draw fletching three weeks before a bride they'd never met arrives, either, unless somebody told them there'd be a reason to need it."
I sat with that a long moment, the wolf under my skin gone very quiet and very cold, the particular stillness I'd learned from my father without ever meaning to inherit it. "He knew. Before the wedding. He knew what she was, or what she might become, and he prepared to kill her for it before she'd even walked through my door."
"That's what it looks like." Callan closed the ledger, careful, like it was something that might still explode in his hands. "I can't prove intent yet. I can prove opportunity, and I can prove it predates anything that happened at the altar. That's not nothing, but it's not enough to move on him publicly. Not yet."
"Then we don't move publicly." I stood, something settling into place behind my ribs, decisive and unpleasant in the way decisions involving family always were. "We move quietly. You keep pulling the thread on the armory signature. I keep Bri close enough that the next attempt has to go through me first."
"And if it comes to a vote? If Halden decides to make her unregistered status the club's problem instead of a family one?"
I didn't answer right away, because the honest answer was one I hadn't fully made peace with myself yet — that I would break Duskrail's own law before I let my own club report my wife like livestock that had wandered outside its pen.
"Then he'll find out exactly how much of this club still answers to me," I said, "and how little of it answers to him."
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