Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter Ten

Lila's POV

The truck bed smelled like rust and old blood, and every pothole in the road sent a fresh jolt of pain through the rope burns at my wrists.

I wept quietly, because quiet was the only kind of crying I could afford. Somewhere in the dark beside me, huddled against the same cold metal wall, three other bodies shifted with every turn, other captives, other wolves, though none of them looked much like wolves anymore. One of them, a boy who couldn't have been much older than me, had a wound along his ribs that had gone the wrong color days ago, weeping dark tears every time the truck lurched. Another lay so still I couldn't tell if she was breathing at all. The third watched me with hollow, exhausted eyes and said nothing, like speaking had stopped being worth the effort a long time before I arrived.

I would have been one of them. If Ryker hadn't thrown himself in front of that arrow, hadn't taken the silver meant for me straight through his own shoulder. I'd have been the one bleeding into rope burns and rust, or worse, I'd have been dead already, one more body left on that stone floor while the Council scattered.

Is he alive?

The thought circled endlessly, the same three words over and over, because I had no way to answer them and no way to stop asking. I reached for the bond the way I'd learned to without meaning to, some instinct older than conscious thought, searching for that low, steady hum that told me he existed somewhere in the world. It was there. Faint, and further away than it had ever felt, but there , a thread pulled thin across an impossible distance, refusing to snap even as everything else in my life came apart around it.

Alive, I told myself. He has to still be alive. I would feel it if he wasn't.

I didn't actually know if that was true. I didn't know anything about this bond except that it hurt in ways I hadn't understood. And that not knowing whether he was alive or dead was its own particular kind of torture, worse in some ways than the rope burns or the cold or the fear of wherever this truck was taking me.

The cab up front had a small sliding window into the bed, cracked open for air, and through it I could hear two men talking over the drone of the engine. I went still, straining to catch every word, because information, any information at all, felt like the only weapon I had left.

"...getting a better price on wolf skins is more lucrative than the last one," one of them was saying, bored, like he was discussing produce. "Collectors up in Fort McKenzie paying good money for anything with a full coat, no rot in the pelt."

"Wolf skins are nothing," the other one said, a laugh in his voice. "You know what actually moves? Werewolf skin. The real kind. Magicians pay triple what any collector will for a pelt taken mid-shift. Something about it makes it good for wards, bindings, whatever they use it for. I don't ask questions, I just count the money."

My stomach turned over, cold and sick.

"That why we're hauling this batch up to the Lord's auction instead of the usual buyer?"

"Some of them are supposed to be higher grade. Old bloodlines, or so the boss says." A pause, the seat creaked as someone shifted. "Though half of them probably aren't even wolves."

"And if they're not?"

"Then they're not worth the trouble of hauling all the way north." His voice went flat, businesslike. My skin crawled worse than any shout could have. "Humans don't fetch anything. No pelt, no power, nothing a magician wants. Just extra weight and extra mouths. We test them at the auction house, if they're not wolves, they get shot on the spot. Cheaper than feeding a burden the rest of the way."

Shot on the spot!

I pressed my hand hard against my mouth to keep the sound that wanted to come out. My whole body had gone rigid, ice flooding through every vein at once, because I understood, with a clarity sharper than anything, exactly what was waiting for me at the end of this road.

If I was human, if whatever had happened at the courtyard, at the Fording, at every strange half-remembered flash of speed and power since my first full moon, turned out to be nothing, some fluke, some trick of adrenaline that didn't actually mean what everyone assumed it meant, I would die. Quickly, efficiently, without ceremony, a bullet and nothing more, because a human wasn't worth the fuel it took to haul her any further north.

And if I wasn't human, if the wolf inside me was real, then I would live a little longer. Long enough to be sold. Long enough for someone to wait, patiently, for the right moment to take my skin.

There was no version of this where I simply walked away.

The boy with the ribbed wound shifted again beside me, a low, pained sound escaping him, and the girl who hadn't moved in what felt like hours finally stirred, just enough to prove she was still breathing. Neither of them looked at me. I don't think either of them had the strength left to look at anything.

I closed my eyes and reached for the bond one more time, desperate for something solid to hold onto, some proof that somewhere out there, someone was still fighting to reach me.

Please, I thought, not entirely sure who or what I was praying to. Please still be alive Ryker. Please still be looking.

The truck hit another pothole, hard enough to throw all four of us against the metal wall, and somewhere in the dark, one of the other captives began, very quietly, to cry too.

I didn't stop them. I didn't have it in me to offer comfort I didn't believe myself.

For the first time since the hunters had dragged me out of that gathering, I let myself accept, fully and without flinching, that I might actually die.