THE BRIDE OFFERED TO WOLVES

Blood Had a Scent

Chapter 5: Blood Has a Scent

They lifted the Oracle from the floor before I could ask her anything. Her eyes were still closed, her breathing shallow, but her lips moved once more as the healers carried her past me, close enough that I caught the words meant for no one.

"Hide her... before the Blood Hunters arrive."

No one explained what that meant. The healers only walked faster, their faces carefully blank in the way servants' faces go blank when they've heard something they wish they hadn't. I stood alone in the corridor for a long moment after they'd gone, the word hunters echoing in a way that made the stone floor feel colder under my bare feet than it had a minute before.

Kael's voice cut through the corridor before the doors had even shut behind them.

"Triple the guards on the Queen's Wing. No one enters her chambers without my permission. She doesn't leave these rooms until I say otherwise."

I watched the guards exchange glances, quick and startled, the kind of look men share when their Alpha has just done something none of them have ever seen him do before. One of them opened his mouth as if to question the order, then thought better of it the moment Kael's eyes landed on him.

"Kael." I waited until the last guard had gone before I said it. "What did she mean?"

"Nothing."

"Don't lie to me. I heard her as clearly as you did."

His jaw tightened. "I'm trying to keep you alive."

"Then tell me what I'm being kept alive from. You can't ask me to sit quietly in this room while everyone around me decides I'm cursed, or hunted, or worse, and refuse to tell me which."

He didn't answer that right away. I watched him war with something behind his eyes, the same restraint I'd seen from him a dozen times now, the careful distance he kept between whatever he actually felt and whatever he allowed himself to say.

"What am I?" I asked, quieter this time.

"I don't know."

He said it like it cost him something to admit, the first honest thing he'd given me since I'd arrived in this kingdom, and somehow that frightened me more than a lie would have. A king who commanded three hundred wolves with a single word, standing in front of me with nothing to offer but the truth that he didn't understand what I was any more than I did.

I couldn't sleep after that. Sometime past midnight I found myself near the door of my chambers again, drawn by voices I wasn't meant to hear, low and hurried, coming from the corridor beyond the guards Kael had posted.

I pressed close to the wall, my heart already climbing into my throat, and recognized the Head Elder's voice first.

"The Queen cannot be allowed to stay alive. The Oracle knows something. If the Alpha learns the truth before we've dealt with her, everything we've built collapses."

A second voice, a noblewoman's, tight with fear. "What if the Alpha discovers we're behind it?"

"Then he never must."

"And the Blood Hunters? If they arrive first…"

"Then let them have her. It solves our problem without a single one of us lifting a hand against her ourselves."

I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone wall, my pulse hammering loud enough that I was certain they'd hear it through the door. They weren't talking about the pack's hatred anymore, or the wedding, or the treaty. They were talking about killing me, and doing it quietly enough that Kael would never trace it back to them.

The voices faded down the corridor before I could hear anything more, footsteps retreating in different directions, careful not to be seen leaving together. I stayed pressed against that wall long after the corridor had gone silent, too afraid to move, too afraid to be caught having heard what I'd heard.

By morning, Kael was questioning the guards himself, and I stood close enough to listen while pretending to study the tapestries lining the hall.

"No guard entered the Queen's chamber that night," one of them said, his eyes fixed somewhere past Kael's shoulder. "I would swear it on my life."

"Then who cut her?" Kael's voice had gone flat, dangerous in its stillness.

"I don't know, Alpha."

"You stood outside her door the entire night."

"I did. I heard nothing. I saw nothing." The guard's voice cracked slightly on the last word. "Whatever came for her didn't come through the door I was watching."

No one answered after that. The guard's silence stretched until Kael finally turned away from him, and I understood, watching his shoulders set, that he had no more answers than I did. He passed close to where I stood, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him, and for one brief moment his eyes found mine before he kept walking, saying nothing, as if speaking might make whatever he was thinking real. I watched him disappear down the corridor and wondered, not for the first time, how a man could carry an entire kingdom's fear without once letting it show on his face.

Nessa helped me change later that afternoon, working the last of the dried blood from my finger with a damp cloth, gentle in a way that made my throat tight.

"You're shaking," she said quietly.

"I heard them, Nessa. The Elder and the others. They mean to see me dead before Kael learns whatever it is they're hiding."

Her hands stilled on my finger for a moment before she made herself keep moving. "Then we tell him."

"Tell him what? That I overheard voices I can't prove belonged to anyone in particular?"

Neither of us had an answer for that.

The mark returned the moment the cloth touched my skin again. Silver light spread beneath the surface, further than it had before, curling up past my wrist toward my forearm in lines too deliberate to be random.

Nessa's hands went still.

"I've seen this before," she whispered.

"Where?"

"In a history book. Years ago. My grandmother kept old texts, ones most families burned generations back." Her voice had dropped to almost nothing. "This isn't just a symbol, Elena. It's part of a crest. A very old one."

"But?"

"They burned every copy of the book that showed it. I only remember because my grandmother hid hers, and even she wouldn't tell me what it meant. Only that it was dangerous to know."

She never got to explain further.

The window shattered.

An arrow tore through the glass and buried itself in the wall a hand's width from my head, close enough that I felt the air move as it passed, close enough that a shard of glass caught my cheek on its way by. I didn't scream. I don't think I made any sound at all, my whole body gone rigid with the kind of fear that arrives too fast for thought.

Nessa was already moving, pulling me down and away from the window, her own breathing ragged as she pressed us both against the far wall.

Pinned beneath the arrow's shaft was a single black feather, and tied to it, a scrap of parchment, the ink still dark as if it had been written only hours before.

She dies before the next full moon.

I stared at those words until they stopped making sense as words at all, until they were only shapes, only threat.

Kael burst through the door moments later, guards flooding in behind him, and crossed the room before anyone else could move. He pulled the arrow free from the wall, feather and message still attached, and went utterly still as he read it. His hand closed around the shaft hard enough that I heard the wood c***k.

Every trace of color left his face.

"They found you," he whispered.