Marked
1012 Words
Chapter 2
LYRA'S POV
The breathing ahead of me stopped the second I froze.
I stood there in the dark with the blade shaking in my hand, waiting for whatever it was to move first.
My whole body was screaming at me to turn around and go back the way I came, but the guards were on the other side of that stone door and they would not care that I hadn't finished the job. They would just care that I was there.
So I stayed still and listened.
Nothing happened for three full seconds. Then something small scurried past my foot, and I nearly cut my own leg open before I realized it was a rat.
Just a rat, running from the same noise that had me ready to kill something. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding and almost laughed, except laughing felt like the wrong thing to do while I was still trapped in a wall with an army looking for me on the other side of it.
I kept moving. Somewhere behind me, I could hear muffled shouting, and I told myself that was good. As long as they were shouting in his room, they weren't in this tunnel with me.
The passage ended at a door with an old iron latch. It was easy to lift from my side. When I opened it, I found a slope covered in dead leaves beyond the outer wall, just like he said I would.
Cold air hit me in the face, and for one second, I just stood there breathing it in, my legs shaking so bad I wasn't sure they'd hold me if I tried to run.
Then the horn went off, and I exhaled loudly, my legs remembered how to work.
I ran until I physically could not run anymore, and then I stopped in the middle of the woods with my hands on my knees, gasping so hard it hurt with each breath I took in.
That was when my wrist started to burn, and I rubbed at it without even really thinking about it.
Then it got worse fast, a deep burn that felt like it was under my skin. Instead, it kept spreading up from where his hand had gripped me earlier. I pulled my sleeve back to look and nearly dropped to my knees right there.
A black mark was spreading across my skin. At first, it looked like a bruise, but then I realized it wasn't. It formed dark, curling lines that looked like some kind of symbol. I stared at it in the dark, my heart pounding for a completely different reason now, and it took me a second to understand what I was looking at.
It was a wolf's paw print. The mark kept spreading slowly up my arm, each dark line appearing on its own, as if an unseen force was drawing it.
"What," I whispered out loud, to nobody, because there was nobody there to answer me. "What is this?"
I pressed my hand over the mark, hoping I could stop it if I pushed hard enough. But it kept moving. I watched it move slowly by another half inch toward my elbow. It didn't feel like a wound, it felt like something waking up.
My legs gave out before I even decided to sit down.
One second, I was standing there staring at my own arm, and the next, I was on my knees in the dirt, my whole body shaking like I had a fever. I tried to push myself back up, but I couldn't. My arms wouldn't listen to me. Nothing in me was listening to me.
I thought about my mother, which was strange, because I hadn't let myself think about her in years without my uncle's voice showing up right behind the memory to remind me she was weak, that she ran, that she left us.
But lying there in the dirt with a wolf's mark spreading up my arm, all I could think about was the way Kade had said her name like it meant something to him.
You have her eyes, he'd said. I didn't think that would actually be true.
What did that mean? What had my mother been to him? What had my mother been at all? If a stranger with gold eyes and a crown could talk about her like she was more than the coward my uncle always described.
I don't know how long I lay there, but I started to think maybe I could sleep right there in the dirt and deal with everything else in the morning.
That was when I noticed the eyes.
My first thought was Kade's men, but my second thought, the one that actually made my stomach drop, was that these weren't wolves at all.
I knew those eyes. I had grown up around men who wore contact lenses cut from wolf eyes, a trick my clan used to blend into the dark during a hunt, to look like something they weren't so their real prey never saw them coming until it was too late.
I had worn a pair myself more times than I wanted to remember. I would know that particular shade of gold-green anywhere because I had stared at it in a mirror before every job since I was twelve years old.
These weren't Kade's soldiers coming to finish what the guards started.
These were my own people.
Someone stepped out of the circle first. Their boots crunched over the dead leaves, nothing like the quiet steps of a wolf. I couldn't see a face yet, just a shape against the dark, tall and broad and horribly familiar in the way it moved, like I'd been trained by watching that exact walk my whole life.
"Well," the voice said, low and almost amused, and my stomach dropped straight through the forest floor. "Look what crawled out of the pack hidden passage."
I knew that voice better than I knew my own.
It was my uncle.
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