Page 70 of Wolf Trial

“Language,” my mum said on reflex, and then realised these were extenuating circumstances. She crouched beside me, and pushed tear-slick hair from my face. Since the moment I was born, everyone had said I had Eirlys Erenhard’s face. The same straight nose, the same quick smile, the same mischievous glint in our green eyes. But where I had grown with muscle in training, my mother was as graceful and slender as a Redwood tree.

“Two wounds?“ My dad asked, sighing as he looked down at Sadie. Lainsz pushed her shirt up her midriff to show where she had been stabbed. “Poor thing.”

While my dad may have been the muscular, physically intimidating half of my parents, he was all careful, gentle care. The moon to my mother’s wrathful sun.

“Who did this?” she demanded, brushing tears off my face. “We’ll shred their bodies to ribbons, and place their heads on spikes around the packlands, I promise.”

“He’s dead, “Lainsz spat.

“Good,” my mother replied fiercely. “When was the last time you ate, all of you?”

I shrugged. Lainsz did the same.

“Verne?” Dad asked, noticing our alpha had been silent all this time.

Verne startled, as if he’d only just noticed they were here. “I don’t want to eat.” His stare fixed on Lucira, her hands fixed to Sadie’s wounds. “Is there any chance…?“

“Just. Let me work,” my sister replied shortly.

We fell silent, watching Sadie as we had for hours. But this time Lainsz was silent, too, his voice not punctuating the suffocating quiet.

I couldn’t handle it. More tears flowed. I wanted to slam my fist through the floorboards, but that was my wolf speaking. If I let him out now in such a destructive emotional state, I might unleash myself on everyone in this room. All the people I loved. And the mate I hadn’t even had the chance to love, because we had too little time together.

What seemed like hours later, Lucira sat back, Sadie’s blood on her hands. “I’ve done all I can, but she might not make it through the night.”

I screwed my eyes shut. She was supposed to say Sadie was healed, that she would survive.

“What can we do?” Mum asked, squeezing my shoulder before she stood. I was colder without her. I wanted to cross the room and clasp Sadie’s hand, wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with Verne, to try and pierce his empty silence, but I couldn’t summon the energy.

Sadie was going to die. All these hours fighting to keep even a thread of her here, and it was for nothing. She was going to die.

“Can you feel her through the bond?” Lucira asked me, glancing at Lainsz and Verne too, answering Mum’s question.

“She’s like ice,” I replied hoarsely.

“Hold onto that ice,” Lucira ordered, striding into the kitchen to wash her hands. “Even when it burns. Even when you go numb. Hold onto that ice.”

So I did. For hours. For days.

CHAPTER 42

SADIE

Deja vu. That was the first thing that struck me, less like a hit than a slow curl of unease. I’d been here before. Waking up, surrounded by the scent of marshmallow, black coffee, and a roaring wood fire. I’d been here before.

I tried to blink. My lashes clung to each other, sleep hesitant to release me even as I fought my way through.

“Sadie?”

Verne. I exhaled in a rush, the unease lifting from my chest. I scrubbed at my eyes, frowning when fabric met my delicate eyelids instead of skin.

“Why am I bandaged?” I asked, so hoarse I sounded like an old woman. Oh, god. “How long?”

“How long have you been unconscious?” That was Leander, the words barrelling from him in a rush of emotion. Mostly panic, but relief too. I could feel them, pressing on my chest, along with something fractured. Like the surface of a serene lake littered with tiny cracks. “Five days,” he answered, and I heard it there in his voice too—the fractures.

Five days. Not sixty years. I hadn’t slept through my whole life.

When I finally opened my eyes and they focused on Leander, his smile was like wallpaper over a fissure. My heart suffocated, balled up tight. He cared this much, after mere weeks…?