For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten (freda ebook reader .txt) 📕

That stiffened him further, made his jaw clench and his eyes arc away from her, to the waiting Wilderwood beyond their ring of cleared ground. “I warned you before. None of the stories here have happy endings.”

“I don’t care about happy endings. I care about you.”

His breath rattled in and out of his lungs. She thought he’d pull away, but instead his hand relaxed into hers, like he didn’t have the energy to resist. When he finally spoke, the words were clouds of fog, with the low, measured cadence of a remembered tale.

“I’d been the Wolf for nearly ten years when Kaldenore came. By then I’d figured out how to use blood to keep the forest mostly together, when . . . when it wanted to take more than I was willing to give. Got the idea from Fife and Lyra.” He faced the tree line, away from her, but the memory of Ciaran’s awful death still drew tension into his shoulders. “I didn’t know what to make of it, not at first. But then I remembered what I’d heard Ciaran say, and Kaldenore showed me the Mark, told me how it called her north.” Shame lowered his tone, made his head dip farther, black hair obscuring his face. “I should’ve sent her back, but the Wilderwood . . . it already had her. It’d tangled itself in her when she first crossed the border.”

The thorn on her cheek, the drop of blood, fanged sentinels chasing her through the fog. “Like it tried to do to me.”

Eammon jerked a nod. “I didn’t know how to stop it. Not then.”

He’d done it for her, though. Shackled the forest through white-knuckle, all-consuming concentration, keeping the wild thing leashed.

Rustling in the leaves around them, almost like a sigh.

“Kaldenore didn’t last long,” he said hoarsely, barely a breath in the chilly air. “The Wilderwood was desperate. It drained her quick.”

“And once it did,” Red murmured, “you were alone with it again.”

“I was alone with it again.” Bitterness laced his voice, bitterness and shame and exhaustion. “I still didn’t fully understand what had happened, not really. But I started to put the pieces together— the bargain, how it’d been worded so there would be Wardens even if Ciaran and Gaya died. Worded so it would pass on.”

His voice cut on their names, but it was deliberate. Cutting was better than breaking.

“After that, I started experimenting. Giving the forest more blood, letting in more magic. Trying to hold it on my own. But then Sayetha arrived.”

Red’s fingers twitched, phantom sympathy for a woman she didn’t know. Kaldenore’s sickly elder sister had served only a year as Queen before dying childless, and Aida Thoriden, the oldest daughter of the next House in line, already had one daughter before she took the throne. Queen Aida learned she was pregnant with Sayetha within weeks of her coronation.

“I tried to keep the same thing from happening to her that happened to Kaldenore.” Eammon’s voice was barely a breath, only audible for the silence of the forest around them. “But I wasn’t strong enough. The Wilderwood drained her, too, in the end.”

A second rib cage, a second skull. Red tasted copper— she’d bitten too far into her lip.

Eammon still faced the trees, still wouldn’t look at her. Dirt patterned the bloody skin of his arms, almost delicate in the dim light. “After Sayetha, I did everything I could, studied whatever I could get my hands on, trying to keep it from calling Second Daughters, or at least from killing them once they came. Merra arrived, eventually, but I was able to keep the forest from her. For a while.”

Death piled around the Wolf, corpses of those he couldn’t save. Those the desperate Wilderwood tore through, bent only on its own survival, on the task set before it and the strength it needed to carry through.

She wanted to scream at it. Wanted to kick the sentinels until they were bloody, wanted to burn them all to the ground.

“It was my fault. I grew complacent.” He shook his head, a fall of dust scattering over bare, still-sweaty shoulders. “I stopped concentrating, after she’d been here awhile. She lived her life and I lived mine, friendly but distant. I thought it could be enough. Maybe the Wilderwood would be content with only her presence and my blood. But it wasn’t.” A snarl in his voice. “It was just waiting for me to slip.”

When they’d kissed in the tower, pressing desperately together, the Wilderwood had seen an opening. Seeping in the windows, growing slowly toward her. And Eammon had noticed, and pushed Red away, knowing that whatever longing they felt could never fully be acted on. Because it would be a distraction, pulling him from the constant work of keeping the Wilderwood shackled. Because bringing her closer to him meant bringing her closer to his hungry forest.

Everything in Eammon was for the Wilderwood— all he was, down to the bone and blood. Everything in his life was oriented around making sure he never slipped again.

Oriented around keeping her safe from the thing that had taken so much of him.

“It came for Merra, and she couldn’t take it.” Still, his voice cadenced like a tale, like he could keep himself at arm’s length from his own history. “She tried to . . . to cut it out. Died before I could stop her.”

Third skull. Third rib cage. Third set of bones, fed on by vines and white trees.

“Cut it out?” The question was a bare breath, shaky and quiet.

That made him turn, finally, his green-and-amber eyes fierce in his dirt-streaked face. “It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.”

But she couldn’t leave it at that, not with the bones in the corner of her vision and his blood tacky between her fingers. Not with the plucked string in her heart, vibrating a frequency she almost knew.

“Tell me what it does to them,” Red whispered, even though