Knot My Luna

Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR — "The Pit"

He didn't say another word after that.

He took his hand off my shoulder like the mark had bitten him, and he went back to the window, and he stood there with his ruined palms open at his sides.

"Get out," he said.

"Kade—"

"Get out."

I got out. I made it down four steps before my legs stopped working, and I sat on the fifth one in the dark with my heart slamming, listening to something break in the room above me. A chair, by the sound of it. Then a second chair.

By noon the whole pack knew there was a mark, and by evening they knew it was double, because there is no such thing as a secret in a building where everybody can smell fear on the stairs.

The elders convened in the long hall. I wasn't invited. I stood in the corridor outside the kitchen doors with a stack of clean plates in my arms like a lunatic, because nobody had told me I was done working, and I have never in my life known what to do with idle hands.

Through the c***k in the door I heard the word heresy four times.

I heard omen twice.

I heard an old man say, "A collared half-breed wearing a Luna's mark is bad enough. Two marks is the Goddess spitting on this pack," and I heard nobody argue with him.

Then somebody said the word pit, and Mrs. Pell took the plates out of my arms and steered me away from the door with her hand flat on my back.

"Don't listen to old men," she said.

"They said—"

"They say a lot." But she wouldn't look at me.

Iris Vane came to the linen room after dark with a candle and told me half the truth.

I know it was half. I could hear the seams.

"A mate bond is a circuit," she said. "One soul, one soul. It closes, and it feeds you both, and that is the whole of it since the Goddess made the first pair."

"Mine's not closing."

"No. Yours forked."

"What does that mean?"

She sat down on the shelf beside me like an old woman with bad knees, which is what she was, and set the candle between us.

"It means the bond opened onto three, and a bond cannot hold three. It doesn't know how. So it pulls." Her hand made a slow closing gesture. "Every full moon it draws from all three of you, trying to close itself. It will take whatever it can get. Strength. Heat. Years."

"Until what?"

"Until only two are left in it."

The candle flame stood up straight and didn't move.

"How many times has this happened?" I asked.

"Nine that I know of."

"And the mates?"

Iris looked at the flame.

"Nine," she said.

I let that sit in me.

"When's the full moon?"

"Four nights." She said it too fast, and then added, quieter, "It's a Blood Moon. That's worse."

"Iris." I turned to face her. "Who is the third?"

And there it was — the seam. She was old and clever and she had been lying to somebody for a very long time, and just for a second the effort of it showed on her face like a c***k in plaster.

"I don't know," she said.

"You dropped a lamp."

"I'm eighty-one. I drop things."

"You knew what my mark was before you finished looking at it."

She stood up, and she picked up her candle, and at the door she stopped with her back to me.

"Child," she said. "There are things in this pack that were done before you were born, and every person who could tell you about them is dead, or lying, or me. Four nights. Worry about the four nights."

They came for June the next morning.

Not roughly. That was the clever part. Two of Cassidy's people, polite as bankers, with a written order and a bag packed for her.

"For her safety," the woman said. "The estate is quieter. Feelings are running high here, and the child is human-passing, and if anything happened to her—"

"Nothing's going to happen to her."

"Then it costs you nothing."

June looked at me across the kitchen with her hands in dishwater, and I watched my sister understand, in real time, at sixteen, that she had just become a thing that could be held over my head.

"Wren," she said. "It's fine. I'll be fine. Tell them it's fine."

I put my hand on the back of her neck and pressed my forehead to hers for exactly two seconds.

"Eat," I said. "Sleep. Don't be brave."

"You first."

They took her out through the yard and I stood in the door and did not follow, because there were nine men in that yard and one of me, and because I have never in my life done the useless thing.

Cassidy Rourke found me an hour later.

She came into the kitchen herself, in boots, with her sleeves rolled, which I understood was a costume but at least it was a well-chosen one.

"Walk with me."

"Do I have a choice?"

"Yes," she said. "That's the entire point of the conversation."

We went out past the training yard and up the long slope where the grass gets thin.

"I'm going to be direct with you," she said. "I've been engaged to that man for two years. Our packs signed it when I was nineteen. It's not love. I'd like you to know that, because I think you've decided I'm a villain and it'll waste both our time."

"You took my sister."

"I removed a sixteen-year-old from a building where the elders are saying the word pit out loud." She kept walking. "You can call that whatever you like. It's also true."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to leave."

I laughed. It came out ugly.

"Tonight," she said. "Reject the bond formally in front of Iris — it can be witnessed, it can be legal, I've checked. Then you take June, and you take money, enough money, and a cart goes out the east road at midnight and nobody stops it. I can make all of that happen before dawn. I have the standing and I have the funds and I am offering."

"Why?"

"Because you'll die otherwise." She said it flatly. "And because I don't want to watch."

"I don't believe you."

"No," Cassidy said. "I didn't think you would."

She stopped walking.

We were on the old ceremonial ground — I'd never been up there, it's not for servants — and in the middle of the flat stones there was an opening in the earth with a low wall around it.

"Look," she said.

I looked.

A pit. Stone-lined, twelve feet deep, dry. There were iron rings set into the walls at the bottom, four of them, rusted to the color of old blood.

"The last mate of a forked bond went down there," Cassidy said. "Forty years ago. They put her in it so the pack wouldn't have to watch her die in the open." She looked at me, and there was no cruelty in her face at all, and that was the worst of it. "She took eleven days, Wren."

I couldn't get my breath.

"They didn't bury her to be cruel. They buried her because the bond was killing both Alphas and she wouldn't choose." Cassidy folded her arms against the cold. "Four nights. Choose, or they'll choose for you."