Page 155 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

I turn onto a wide street, pausing to gasp for breath in a covered alley. A rustle shifts beside me. Footsteps, rushing right up at my back—

But the face emerging from the mist and rainy shadows isn’t Wolf.

The fist colliding with my ribs definitely isn’t, either. Panic, then pain, seize my racing mind. Blinding bursts of it, radiating with each punch, each kick.

I fight, but I’m already down on the ground. Rough hands wrench mine behind my back, shove my face into the cold, soaking cobblestones, and slam my head down.

Darkness explodes behind my skull, and the pain falls away.

Everything does.

THIRTY-EIGHT

I come back to consciousness slowly, crawling up from the depths of the throbbing blackness behind my eyes.

Don’t look,the voice in my head pleads.

Just the smell of this place… tears sting my eyes, even as I clamp them shut. Terror cranks up every sense, no matter how hard I wish they would all just fade away.

I don’t want to look. I don’t want toknow—but I have to.

I can’t prepare if I can’t see what’s coming for me.

I hear voices. One that’s vaguely familiar. The other a viper, dripping with poison and a haunting lilt that makes my skin crawl.

Slowly, so slowly, I force my burning eyes open.

The room around me isn’t so much a room as it is a carved-out husk of gray rock and iron bars. The walls, if they can be called that, curve in ragged slopes that make the space feel like a half circle, and a crudely drawn one at that.

Metal bars crisscross into a slatted wall some ten feet out of my reach. Between the bars and me is a wooden table that’s as stained and worn and cracked as the one on the Black Quay.

A horrifying array of metal instruments lies on it. Along with all my weapons, and the sword my sister gave me.

Fear swallows up everything I am, every thought. I jerk, butmy wrists and ankles are bound in cold metal shackles, and a rusted chair creaks beneath me at the movement.

There’s nothing left to put up there after the Lady of Shadows finishes with us.

That’s what Wolf said, the confession that ripped him apart.

Old Ones, help me.

“Ah,” a figure in the shadows says from the other side of the iron slats. They tilt a cloaked head toward me, another smaller cloaked figure following close. “Our guest is awake.”

The figure steps through a narrow door in the iron, and I wrench back.

Pure instinct takes over me. Cold metal creaks and groans in the chair beneath me but refuses to give. It claws into my wrists, around the bones of my ankles in unforgiving shackles.

I choke on a sharp crash of terror.

“Come and say hello, my dear,” the shadowy figure says, waving her hand to the smaller one. “Manners matter, even here. And we aren’t really strangers, are we?”

The dank, foul air of this place closes in. But I can’t crawl back. I can’t get away, and the small figure steps through the iron hinges like she wants to be here just as much as I do.

The flicker of the only candle laid out on the table illuminates the nearing figure’s sweeping, long cloak.

Her frayingpurplecloak.

Aoife steps into the light.