He was afraid, and all the shame in the world couldn’t shift it from his bones.
Chapter Eight—Jack
“HERE,” GREGORsaid as he slid down the wall to sit next to Jack. He handed Jack the battered, now-empty mug. It had taken him a while to work out his black, caustic mood on Tom and the walls. His voice was tattered, and his hands bruised, skin split and shredded over the bony jut of his knuckles. Careless. Even a dog would realize there was something wrong when the Numitor’s son’s knuckles scabbed over instead of healed. “Recognize it?”
Jack turned the mug in his hand. There was a fresh chip on the rim, and the cup was greasy with the residue of spilled coffee and dirty, sweaty hands. But even in the dim light of the cell, Jack could make out the bright, aggressive green of the glazed paint.
“It’s Da’s,” Jack said. Coffee in the morning or whiskey in the evening, his da had drunk it out of this mug. A sour laugh squeezed out of his chest as he leaned his head back against the cold stones. “That’s fucking pathetic.”
Gregor snorted his agreement.
Da had smashed enough cups against the wall or floor from carelessness or temper. Or he used to catch rusty brown water from a drip in the pipes under the toilet or filled it with white spirit and vinegar to get rust off something. Once he’d used it to brew the mountain ash gall to ink a new wolf into the Pack, then sent Danny to buy a new one because his coffee gave him the shits after.
Only an idiot would think that the Old Man—dead or gone—would give a damn what anyone did with a cup he didn’t have to drink out of. That was Lach, though.
“He broke your dog’s ankle once,” Gregor said. “Left him to crawl down from the hills on his own.”
Jack paused for a second as a mixture of anger and jealousy twisted sickly in his stomach. He’d never fought Danny’s battles for him. Da wouldn’t have stood for that. Even dogs had to be able to stand up for themselves to stay in the Pack, but what Gregor had said sounded more like torture than a fight.
“He never told me that,” Jack said once he’d swallowed the sour bubble of bile back down. “I would have—”
“Made it worse,” Gregor said. “Lach threatened Bron if Danny told anyone, told him that ‘things happened to reckless girls’ who don’t have people to look out for them. I guess he convinced Danny he should hold his tongue, because your dog didn’t say anything to anyone.”
Jack set the cup down and wiped his hands on his jeans. He gave his brother a cold look. “Then how do you know?”
Gregor shrugged unrepentantly. “Lach thought I’d be grateful he fucked with what was yours,” he said. The corner of his mouth tilted with old contempt. “I wasn’t. It just proved that he wasn’t just a bully, he was a coward. He couldn’t even beat up a dog without a girl to hide behind.”
“And you didn’t do anything?”
Gregor glanced at him in surprise, eyebrows raised. “He was your dog, not mine. Why should I care?”
Jack supposed he should have expected that, but sometimes…. Sometimes he thought this fragile alliance with his brother could work. It had always seemed like the world had only made enough room for one of them, that they had to shove and snarl to claim it for their own. With everything the Wolf Winter had carved out of them, Jack wondered if maybe there wasenoughleft between them.
But then Gregor would open his mouth and remind Jack they still hated each other.
“I might have warned him off Bron, made sure he knew that wolves didn’t have accidents, but I didn’t need to,” Gregor said. “Next time Lach got dragged over the loch to go to school, one of the town girls he’d been screwing threw coffee on him and accused him of putting something in her drink. When the teachers looked into it, they found a bag of drugs in his bag.”
Jack frowned as a flicker of memory cut through his anger at Gregor. He’d been there when the local police arrived—sweaty-nervous as they ventured onto Da’s land even if they didn’t know why—and when his da dragged Lach out and beat him in front of the whole Pack, Danny had been there too, and Jack had thought it was a dog’s weak stomach that made Danny look away from the beating despite the fact he hated Lach.
“You think he set that up?” Jack asked skeptically. “If Da found out that Danny had deliberately brought the cops up here, into pack business, he’d have exiled the whole family over the Wall. Hell, Da believed that the drugs weren’t Lach’s, and he still nearly sent him away just for being stupid enough to get into that situation. Why would Danny take that risk? It wasn’t like he was scared of starting a fight.”
Or losing one. Danny had never fought to win. He knew that most of the time he wouldn’t. He aimed to hurt the other person enough to make them think the win wasn’t worth it—dislocated knees, gouged eyes, and the humiliation that everyone knew a dog had made them yelp. But that had been a fight he hadn’t wanted to lose.
Danny and Bron had never been close. Neither were Jack and Gregor, though, and they only made it back to Lochwinnoch because they weren’t about to let someone else kill their brother. There were times Danny forgot he was a dog—sometimes even Jack did—but it was when hedidn’tthat he was most dangerous.
Because a dog didn’t have to play by the rules.
“A coward and a bully wouldn’t risk exile to get payback,” Jack said. “And Danny’s always been stupid where his sister was concerned. So if he’s not here, we know why. Why tell me this, Gregor?”
Gregor folded one arm over his chest to rub his shoulder. He didn’t smell of fresh blood anymore, but under the hot, metallic tang of his temper, there was a murky hint of pain. It had started to heal, but it hadn’t stopped hurting.
“Kath asked me to trust her,” he said. “But I trust you. At least about this. Danny’s your dog. You care, and you’ve always been stupid for him. So what are you going to do to get him back?”
He waited.
So did Jack, but nothing came to him. He pushed himself up the wall—the sudden focus of everyone’s attention—and hoped that would change in a minute.
“Fuck the prophets,” he said roughly. “And fuck any wolf that shows throat to them. The Wolf Winter belongs to us. We were promised it, and we do not forgive that promise. The gods should fear us. Not the other way around.”
