جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

Zayden POVI heard things before I saw them.That was how it always worked inside Obsidian Keep. Sound traveled through stone differently than it traveled through wood and open air. The voice was Petra's,I recognized it immediately. She decided her small authority inside a kitchen corridor made her untouchable.I had been walking toward the eastern staircase when it reached me and I changed direction without breaking pace.I turned the corner into the southern corridor just as Mira was pulling Nerissa away from the kitchen doorway.I stopped,neither of them saw me.Nerissa's shoulders were straight and her chin was level and she was looking directly at Petra.Petra said something I caught the tail end of.‘Wolves like you don't stay in places like this for long.’I stayed where I was until they disappeared around the far corner.Then I looked at the kitchen door.Petra was back at the preparation table when I walked in.The two younger ones were beside her. Lena and the quiet one who

Nerissa POVKaelor walked fast.We moved through the inner corridor and past the eastern staircase and I expected him to go up. Toward Zayden's study. Toward the upper floors where authority lived inside this fortress.He went down the staircase and where he turned into was narrow,darker than the others. The torches set into the walls here were spaced further apart and the stone under my feet changed texture, rougher.The air changed too. It was cooler with something underneath it that I couldn't immediately name but that made my wolf press forward inside me with her ears flat."Where are we going?" I asked."Below," Kaelor said."I gathered that," I said. "Below what specifically.""The cells," he said.I kept walking but something tightened in my chest.Darius had mentioned rogue prisoners in passing the day before and moved on quickly. I filed it then and kept moving.Now apparently the filing was about to become relevant.The staircase ended at a heavy iron door.Kaelor pushed it

Nerissa POVI noticed it first on a Tuesday or what I thought was Tuesday. Days inside Obsidian Keep had a way of blurring into each other. The fortress ran on its own rhythm and that rhythm had nothing to do with the outside world. It had to do with patrol rotations and training schedules and the particular way the torches in the upper corridors burned lower by late afternoon and got replaced by servants moving quickly and quietly before anyone important noticed.I had started learning that rhythm.You watched,you listened,you filed things and slowly the shape of the place built itself inside your head until you could move through it without constantly feeling like you were about to walk into something you didn't see coming.I was in the outer passage carrying fresh torch oil to the upper corridor brackets when I felt something at the back of my neck.Someone was watching me,I turned.The corridor was empty in both directions.I stood there for a moment,looking at the doors running

Nerissa POVThe water in the bathing room was hot,steam rising from the surface and curling toward the low stone ceiling in slow lazy patterns.Mira arranged it without being asked.She didn't explain why. She just told me the bathing room at the end of the east corridor would be available for an hour before the morning duties started and left a clean towel folded on the bench outside the door without making anything of it.I stood in the water up to my waist and let the heat work into muscles that had been carrying tension for so long I had stopped noticing how heavy they were.Red Claw didn't have hot water for omegas.Cold pumped water from the barrel outside the servant quarters. In and out quickly because the barrel was shared and taking too long meant someone's hands across the back of your head and a lecture about selfishness.I turned my face up toward the steam and closed my eyes.For approximately four minutes I let myself not think about anything.Then I reached for the soa

Nerissa POVI didn't tell anyone about the word on the floor.I stood in that corridor for a long time after Zayden disappeared up the eastern staircase looking at it. Turning it over in my mind the way you turned something sharp over in your hands, carefully, aware that the wrong angle could cut you.Ashwood,Written in blood on the floor of the lower training hall. By a warrior who had been repeating Red Claw gossip about me casually in the corridor that morning like it was nothing worth keeping to himself.A warrior who had traveled with Alpha Magnus.A warrior who was inside Obsidian Keep right now.I filed it. Locked it into the part of my mind where I kept things that needed more information before they came to conclusions. Then I picked up the linen stack I left on the corridor bench and finished the morning duties and said nothing to anyone.Mira noticed my silence at midday."You're quiet," she said."I'm always quiet," I said."You're quieter than you're quiet," she said.I