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

slightly, like he wanted to run it over her knuckles. He didn’t. “You are too good for this.”

Neve looked at Arick, confusion and uncertainty freezing her in place. In the silver light through her window, his eyes looked almost blue instead of green.

He squeezed her hand, once, before dropping his. “It will be over soon.” Then Arick bowed, and slipped out into the dark.

Chapter Twenty-Five

S he woke with her spine at odd angles and her neck aching. Red sat up with a disgruntled sound, rolling her shoulders. On the bed, Eammon’s deep, even breathing was just shy of a snore.

A smirk pulled at her mouth. She’d have to tell him the issue persisted.

Firelight combed golden highlights through his black hair, his face softened in sleep. She studied its angles, for once not hardened by exhaustion and teeth-clenching control. There was a slight scar through one dark eyebrow. Stubble shaded his jaw, a tiny nick from a careless razor right below his chin. It heartened her, strangely, to see a mark not made for the Wilderwood.

And to think, she’d once thought the Wolf too severe to be handsome.

Red pushed his hair off his forehead. He sighed, still asleep, moving the angle of his chin so his lips brushed her palm. The root-tendril Mark stood out against his pale skin, swirling to halfway down his forearm, up past his elbow. Last night, she’d been too preoccupied with saving him from the forest to concentrate on the shape of his chest, the breadth of his bare shoulders. All things she’d noticed before, obviously— it was impossible not to— but not this close, not since the night she healed him.

The sheet pooled around his waist where he’d kicked it down in the night, and the faint blush of those three scars glanced across his abdomen. Her hand was half reaching to touch them before she pulled it back.

No. She couldn’t. They couldn’t.

The dining room was empty when she went down the stairs, and so was the kitchen. A battered kettle hung over a banked fire, and she poked it into flame before scouring the shelves for tea leaves. She half hoped she wouldn’t find them, one more thing to stall the inevitable.

Red had to leave. She had to go to Valleyda.

It had been foolish to put it off as long as they had. Only a day, but she should’ve left the moment she realized what was happening. The only reason she hadn’t was because she didn’t want to leave him. He’d let himself be a distraction, let her use him as procrastination; stalling the inevitable just as much as she was. She didn’t know whether she wanted to hit him or kiss him for it.

Both, probably.

The pot whistled. Red jumped and pulled it off the hook, too quickly. A burn stung across her knuckles, and she looked at it for a moment, thinking of Eammon, how he always insisted on taking her hurt.

She resolved not to let him see it.

Red was on her second cup of weak tea when Lyra walked through the broken arch of the dining room, pulling leaves from her hair. Her tor clattered to the table as she sat across from Red, wrinkling her nose at the teapot. “I hate this stuff.”

“It’s all I could find.” The blade’s edge was dark, smeared with Lyra’s blood and something like sap. “What happened?”

“More missing sentinels.” Lyra pulled a cloth from her pocket and rubbed it along the tor’s edge. It didn’t do much other than spread the muck around, and she quickly abandoned the endeavor with a low curse. “Cut up a few shadow-creatures, but I couldn’t do anything about the holes. My blood won’t touch them anymore. Doesn’t do a damn thing.”

More holes. He’d healed them all, nearly given up himself to do it, only for more to appear mere hours later. “Eammon healed them all last night. All the breaches.” Red sighed. “Didn’t take long for new ones to open.”

The other woman’s eyebrows flicked up, a thoughtful expression on her elfin face. Lyra set her tor aside. “Self-martyring bastard.” Despite her earlier protestation, she tugged over the teapot and poured herself a cup. Then she sat, peering at Red through the steam as it wreathed her dark curls. “Do you want to help him?”

“Of course I do.” The question was unexpected, but the answer was so automatic that Red didn’t have time to be caught off guard.

Lyra settled in her seat, legs crossed and tea cupped between her palms, watching Red like she was weighing something in her mind. Finally, her dark eyes closed, long lashes sweeping her cheeks. “He’s kept it from you. You know that, right?”

She did. In Red’s mind, bones wrapped around the base of a tree, tangled with vines.

“He’s done it for so long, and I don’t think he’ll stop. Especially not now.” Lyra sighed, sipped her tea. “I don’t know how it works. Not fully. The way the Wolf and the Wilderwood tangle together and how they come apart. But I know that if anything is going to change, Red, it will have to be you that does it.”

Choice. A memory of rustling leaves and cracking branches, forest sounds shaped to a word.

“If I knew what you had to do, I’d tell you. Even though Eammon would hate me for it. But I don’t.” She placed her chipped teacup on the table, next to her tor. “Something about this is different, both with you and with the Wilderwood. Something more than Eammon holding it back. And you’re the only one who can figure it out.”

Their eyes locked across the table. Red nodded.

Another beat of silence, then Red pushed back her chair, stood. “Do you want bread?”

Lyra shook her head. Red grabbed two slices— one for her, one for Eammon. A letdown of a parting gift, after he’d given her a bridal cloak and the tangled thread of his history. She trudged up the stairs like stones were tied around her