The Hunters Alpha's Mate

The Clan's Judgment

Chapter 3

Lyra's POV

Nobody helped me up. Two hunters grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet like I was a sack of grain, and I let them because my legs still weren't steady enough to stand on their own.

My uncle, commander Voss, stood in front of me with his arms crossed, studying me the way he studied everything, like I was a problem he hadn't decided how to solve yet.

Commander Voss was not a big man, but he never needed to be because people got small around him without him doing anything at all.

"You're late," he said. "The second bell rang almost an hour ago."

"I got out through a passage I didn't know about," I said. "It took time."

"Did it." He didn't ask it like a question. He said it like he already had an answer and was just waiting to see if mine would match. "And the King?"

I made myself hold his eyes. My uncle had taught me that lying works better when you don't blink first, so I didn't.

"Dead," I said. "I got to him while he was asleep."

Something in his face didn't change, and that was worse than if it had. He just looked at me a little longer.

"You got to him while he was asleep," he repeated. "And yet the whole castle is lit up behind you like it's under attack. Guards run around. Horns are going off every few minutes."

He took a deep breath. "That's a strange amount of noise for a dead man."

I hadn't thought about how it would look from out here. Of course, they'd seen the torches, heard the horns. I should have had a better answer ready before I opened my mouth.

"They found the body," I said. "That's why they're panicking."

"Mm." He uncrossed his arms and stepped closer, close enough that I had to fight the urge to step back, which would have told him everything even if my words didn't.

"You know what I find interesting, Lyra? In fifteen years of sending hunters into that castle, not one of them has ever come back out the way you did tonight, unhurt. Through a secret passage that nobody has ever mentioned finding before."

"Maybe nobody looked hard enough."

"Maybe." He reached out and grabbed my wrist before I could pull it back, the same wrist Kade had held only an hour ago, and turned it over hard enough that I gasped in pain.

The mark had spread further while I was running. It curled almost to my elbow now, black lines branching out from the paw print like roots, and in the moonlight it looked even worse than it had before, like something alive under my skin instead of a bruise on top of it.

My uncle went very still.

"What is that," he said, and for the first time all night, his voice lost its calm.

"I don't know." That part, at least, was true. "It started after I left his room. I don't know what it is."

He turned my arm so the other hunters could see it. I watched their faces change, one by one. Their calm expressions disappeared, and they were now replaced by shock.

One of them, a younger one I didn't know well, actually took a step back, like the mark itself might reach out and grab him.

"You're lying to me about something," my uncle said quietly, and it scared me more than shouting would have. "Maybe not about all of it. But you're lying about something, and that mark tells me exactly which part."

"I don't know what you want me to say. I did the job."

"No." He let go of my wrist like it burned him too. "You didn't. If you had, that mark wouldn't be crawling up your arm right now, and you wouldn't be standing here shaking like you just ran from something a lot worse than guards."

I opened my mouth to argue, and nothing came out because he wasn't wrong, and some small stupid part of me still wanted to protect the truth of what had actually happened in that room.

Not because Kade deserved it, but because I didn't fully understand it myself yet, and telling my uncle the truth felt like handing him something, I hadn't even looked closely enough to know what it was.

"There's history in our clan," my uncle said, more to himself than to me now, his eyes still fixed on my arm. "Old stories about hunters who got too close to what they were hunting. About blood that reacts wrong when it touches a wolf a certain way,"

He swallowed down on nothing like he was scared of saying those words. "I never believed most of it. My father used to say those stories were just excuses for weak hunters who couldn't finish the job."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"I don't know yet." He looked up at me, and for the first time that night, I saw something in his face that wasn't cold calculation.

It looked almost like fear, but it was buried before I could be sure. "But your mother had scars like that. Small ones, on her wrist, that she never explained. I always assumed it was from training. Now I'm not so sure."

My whole body went cold hearing that. "You never told me that."

"There was no reason to, until tonight." He straightened up, and just like that the softness in his face disappeared completely, locked back behind the commander I'd known my whole life instead of the uncle who might have actually cared for one second. "Take her to the silver cell."

"What? No, I did the job, I told you..."

"You told me a story that doesn't match what I'm looking at." His voice was flat now.

The tone he used when a decision had already been made and arguing would only waste both our time. "Until that mark explains itself, you're not walking around free, blood or no blood."

Two hunters grabbed my arms again, tighter this time, and I didn't fight it because fighting my own clan in front of a dozen witnesses would only prove whatever they already suspected about me. My uncle turned to walk away and then stopped, glancing back at me one more time.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I hope you did finish the job. Because if that mark means what I think it might mean, a dead alpha is the only thing that gives you any chance of walking out of that cell tomorrow instead of somewhere worse."

He didn't explain what he meant by somewhere worse. He didn't need to. I'd heard enough stories growing up about what happened to hunters who turned into something else. I knew exactly what he meant, even though he didn't say it out loud.

They marched me back through the trees toward the compound, my bare feet numb against the cold ground, my arm still burning under their hands every time they gripped it too hard. I kept my face blank the whole way because that was the only thing I had left to control.

Nut inside my head, I kept circling back to two things over and over.

My uncle thought my mother might have been something more than a coward who ran.

And somewhere back in that castle, a King with gold eyes was probably being blamed for letting me live, and I had no way of knowing whether that decision was going to get him killed by his own people before I ever saw him again.

The silver cell door swung open. The smell of metal and old blood hit me right away. It had been there for years, soaked into the stone no matter how much anyone tried to clean it. They shoved me inside without saying a word. The door slammed shut behind me with a heavy bang.

I sat down in the dark, wrapped my arms around my knees, and stared at the black mark, still spreading slowly across my skin.