The Enstranged Alpha's Mate

Chapter Thirteen:The Key In His Palm

"It's not about territory," Pike said. "That's the story he tells the pack. But I was at the fire the night he decided on the ceremony raid, and I heard what he said to Reyes. He said, if that bond holds, we can't touch either of them. Not in the old way. Not with the elders watching. But if it breaks, if one of you dies or one of you walks, it all comes apart. The alliance, the truce, every clause." He rolled his head back toward Rowan. "It's not an army he needs. It's a wedge."

"A wedge," Kane repeated.

"Between you." Pike said it almost gently. "That's what all of this is for. The skirmish. The envoy. The invitation to the gathering. The rat. He's been building a pry bar for months, and he's very good at it."

Rowan felt the bond pulse at her collarbone, warm and tight, and she thought of Kane's hand around hers on the water trough and understood, with a coldness that started in her stomach and spread outward, that Pike was right. Every piece fit. The gathering invitation hadn't been meant to trap the alliance. It had been meant to test how much pressure the alliance could take before it snapped.

"Why tell us?" she asked.

"Because I'm dying," Pike said.

It was so plain that for a second nobody reacted. Then Brie pushed off the wall.

"Ines checked him," Kane said sharply. "She said the leg was clean."

"It is clean." Pike smiled, faintly, at nothing. "It's not the leg."

He turned his chained wrist over, and Rowan saw what she'd missed. A thin black line ran from the inside of his wrist up under his sleeve, branching like a river delta, and the skin around it was the wrong color, gray at the edges, going purple in the middle. She was on her feet before she'd decided to be.

"Wolfsbane," Brie said, and her voice cracked. "Ines! Ines, get in here!"

"It's in the blade," Pike said. "The one they stuck me with before they left. Thorne doesn't leave loose ends. Doesn't matter. I'd already decided to talk." His chest was rising and falling faster now, shallow, ragged. "Look. I've got one more for you and then I'm done. Are you listening?"

"I'm listening." Rowan dropped to her knees at the cot's edge and took his free hand. She didn't remember deciding to. It was cold already. "Pike. Tell me."

"Your house," he said. His eyes had gone glassy, unfocused, and he was looking at something over her shoulder that wasn't there. "You left your house open. They said the door was never even locked."

"Which house? Pike."

"Ashwood." The word came out on a breath. "They're going home."

"When?" Kane was at her shoulder now, and she hadn't heard him cross the room. "When, Pike? Now? Tonight?"

But Pike's eyes had gone still, fixed and wide, and the hand in Rowan's went limp. The room filled with Ines and the sound of Ines swearing. Rowan stayed where she was, kneeling on stone with a dead man's hand in hers, and felt the world tilt underneath her.

Ashwood was three hundred miles away. Two hundred wolves lived there. Most of them were children or old, or so freshly broken that they'd never learned to fight. She had brought thirty fighters with her to Voss. Thirty of her best, her second, her scouts, her strongest. That was everyone who could have held a door.

She'd left the door open.

"Rowan," Kane said quietly.

"Don't." She was already getting up. Her voice came out very calm, which was the worst sign, and she knew it. "Brie. Get the truck."

"Rowan, the alliance—"

"I don't care about the alliance."

"I know you don't." Kane took her by the shoulders. His hands were warm, and steady, and he waited until she was looking at him. "I know. I'm not going to stop you. I want you to hear that first. But listen to me for one minute before you go tearing down a mountain in the dark on three hours of sleep."

"You have one minute."

"Thorne wants you to run home. It's the wedge. If you leave now, alone, he splits us exactly the way he planned." His thumbs pressed lightly at her collarbone, right over the mark. "I'm not saying don't go. I'm saying if you go, I go with you. Both packs. One front. He can't split what he can't separate."

For a moment she wanted to hit him, purely on principle. Then she wanted to lean her forehead against his chest and stay there for a very long time. She did neither. She stepped back, and pulled her shoulders straight, and looked at the dead man on the cot.

"Your father is in the healer's tent with a hole in him," she said. "Your pack just lost seven people and there's a rat in your council. You can't leave."

"Watch me."

"Kane."

"I mean it." He held her gaze. "You told me once that a partnership between equals means neither one runs the other's fight alone. I'm not sure I believed it then. I believe it now."

From the doorway, Brie cleared her throat. "The truck's out front," she said. "I've also, for the record, already called Maren at home. Nobody answered."

That was all she said. It was enough.

Rowan stood very still in a stone room that smelled of yarrow and death, with a mate who wasn't quite hers yet and a home she was terrified was burning, and made the only choice available. It didn't feel like a choice. It felt like gravity.

"Then we go," she said. "All of us. Now."

Behind them, Ines looked up from the cot with her hands red to the wrist and said, in a very small voice, "Alpha? There's something else."

They all turned.

Ines was holding Pike's other hand open. Pressed into the palm, wrapped in a strip of sweat-dark cloth, was a small brass key. Rowan knew it at once, and the knowing went through her like ice water. It was the key to the front door of her cabin. The one she kept on a nail by the hearth. The one she'd told nobody about.

Somebody at Ashwood had given it to him.