“Have you…been drinking?” I asked, astonished.
“My new friends like me, Aika.” He laughed. “So much.”
I started shaking my head even before he’d finished, disgust seething through my blood. “These arenotyour friends.”
“But…”
“Listen to me.” I held to his face harder. “How did you get here? Where’s Jade?” The panic in my voice sharpened to a point, and I could feel him wince.
“The nice man took us here. Jade’s in that place.” He nodded his head toward the left.
“What nice man, Lee?Whatplace?” I demanded.
“The Scratching Post,” one of his “friends” said.
Everything inside of me went numb. Oh god. Oh god, Jade. I’d heard of The Scratching Post the couple of times I’d been to Old Man’s Den. Men liked to brag loudly about the women there and all the different ways they liked to be poked.
Because The Scratching Post was a goddamn brothel, and Jade was only fifteen.
My throat suddenly felt raw and hoarse like I’d started screaming into a void. I had to get her out of there. I had to get them both out of Old Man’s Den.
Someone knocked into me hard going the other direction, bumping me away from Lee and nearly sending me to the road on my noodle-like legs.
“Say goodbye to your girlfriend,” a rough voice said. “It’s time to hit the next tavern.”
“Goodbye, Aika. I love you.”
“No, Lee.” I reached out for him, searching in an endless sea of movement, but he’d already gone. “Lee, please, come back!”
My shout was swallowed whole by rougher, deeper ones, coming straight at me like an angry wall.
“Edenberry said he smelled a rival wolf coming this way,” a man said as he passed by. “Only one but there could be more coming.”
Archer.
My heart pummeled everything on its fall down to my toes. I spun around in the direction the men were headed, into Slipjoint Forest. I could only imagine what they would do to Archer if they found him.
I worried my lip, sudden indecision pulling hard in four different directions. To Archer. To Jade. To Lee. Or to make the fake delivery.
Forcing a breath from my icy lungs, I took my next step, my mind made up.
Chapter 10
Ihated walking through towns, especially now with a walking stick, because I felt like I was shouting the fact that I was blind from the top of my lungs. I grew defensive if anyone got too close or said the wrong thing. Just ask Jade.
“Who? This?” she’d said once while nudging me. “I’m taking care of her and my brother.”
We’d been strolling through Margin with Lee on our heels, and she’d said it to impress some random boy she’d met two seconds earlier. So, I’d taken Lee and Hellbreath back to Margin’s Row without her and made her walk a large chunk of the twenty miles back. I would’ve let her do the whole trek if not for Lee getting upset about it, and after I finally rounded back to pick her up, the summer sun beating down, she didn’t speak to me for weeks.
We had a complicated relationship, and I often hated the attention she received for her looks and was even jealous of her name. Jade sounded so much more exotic than Aika. Jade had purpose. Aika was just some random letters strung together to make a weird sound at the back of your throat.
Still, she might as well have been my blood sister, and now I was leaving her behind in a brothel. Leaving her brother behind to drink even more at another tavern with his so-called friends.
And Archer… He could fend for himself.
I had to believe that, just as I had to believe I was making the right choice by continuing with my original plan.
Guilt dragged at each of my steps, though, as I cut my way through the crowd in slow motion.
