Chapter 13: Once upon a night
BONNIE
The two Sentinels dragging me to the holding block made it clear from the start that comfort was not on the itinerary.
The first Sentinel gripped my hair before we even left the library, using it like a leash on something beneath him, jerking my head at angles that made my neck howl just to keep me moving at his pace. The second hovered behind me, close enough to make it clear this was about dominance, not security. Every few steps, he shoved me between the shoulder blades, hard enough to send me stumbling into the first one’s hold, earning another vicious tug for my trouble.
"Walk straight," the first one said, like I had a choice in the matter, with my wrists still bound and my balance compromised by three gunshot wounds that my body was refusing to heal.
I kept silent. Words cost more energy than I could spare, each one clawing its way up from somewhere far below my throat.
By the time we hit the stairwell to the lower block, the second Sentinel had had enough of shoving and escalated. His boot hooked the back of my knee on the third step, sending me crashing down, my bound hands useless, my shoulder slamming into stone where the ghost pain from the bullet still slept under the muscle. The pain that exploded from the impact was a new, raw kind, sharper than the gunshots, and I heard a sound escape me that I didn’t recognize as my own.
"Get up," the first one said, already hauling me by the rope around my wrists, which dragged the wolfsbane-soaked fiber tighter against skin that was already raw and weeping.
I forced myself upright. Every alternative promised something uglier.
They put me in a cell at the end of a corridor lined with iron bars and bad lighting, and the second one used the opportunity of getting me through the door to drive his knee into my stomach, once, with no warning and no provocation beyond the fact that he could. I folded around the impact and hit the floor of the cell, and the door clanged shut above the sound of my own breathing.
I had been hurt worse than this. That was the strange comfort I reached for as I lay there on cold stone with my body screaming from six different directions. I had survived things that should have killed a person twice over, things from before I had a life that meant anything, things I didn’t let myself revisit unless I was bleeding on a floor somewhere and needed a reason to believe I’d survive the current version of bleeding on a floor.
This was bad. It wasn’t the worst.
I hauled myself upright against the wall and started running the numbers, because cold calculation had always kept me alive longer than instinct ever did.
I was the perfect ending to this story. That was the cold center of it, the part I kept circling back to no matter how many times I tried to think my way around it. A dead King. A scandal nobody wanted examined too closely, not with an infertility confession and a bastard prince sitting somewhere in the wreckage of it. A rogue retainer who had lied about her gender to get into the estate, found alone in the room with the body and the weapon.
I wasn’t a suspect. I was a solution. The kind of solution that lets everyone go back to their lives without anyone having to ask harder questions about who actually wanted Alpha King Cornelius dead and why.
My breathing was coming too fast, and I knew it, the rapid, shallow pull of air that didn’t actually get anywhere useful, and I pressed my back harder into the wall and tried to slow it down.
Why hadn’t I just run?
The question tore through me, sharper than any wound. I’d had the corridor, the open door, the empty hallway—every chance to vanish into the night and never look back. Instead, my traitorous hand glowed blue and I walked toward a sound that should have sent me running the other way.
I closed my eyes.
That was when the memory came back. Not gently. It arrived the way drowning arrived, all at once and with no warning, my own voice from an hour I couldn’t fully place anymore, saying I can help you, and underneath it, something else. A different voice. Worn thin and fading, but present.
Forget fixing me.
I sat very still.
Fix yourself. Tell Lysander he has to take the throne before the children of the night sink their claws into it.
I opened my eyes and stared at the bars across from me and tried to figure out if that had actually happened or if my brain, starved of blood and running on fumes, had manufactured something out of panic and proximity to a dying man.
When I had tried to save him, I had gone unconscious, and my gifts had decided to save just me. That was what happened.
Children of the night.
The phrase lingered on my tongue like a half-remembered name, something I’d heard before in another life, its source lost to me. It felt ancient, more like a nursery whisper than something spoken in a blood-soaked library, and that mismatch unsettled me more than the words themselves.
I let it go. I had bigger problems than my delusions of the half-formed words from a man who might have already been past the point of meaning anything he said.
The bigger problem, the one circling everything else, was Alpha Lysander.
He knew I was innocent. I had felt that through the bond, whatever that bond actually was, some kind of certainty passing between us that didn’t need words. He’d said it out loud, in front of the sentinels, in front of his cousin. That I was innocent.
In a just world, I guess that would count for something. But this was no just world.
It wouldn’t matter. I knew men like him, even though I’d never personally known one this close. Royal blood didn’t make people braver. It made them more careful about what they spent their courage on, and a half-feral retainer with a stolen identity and platinum hair wasn’t going to rank high on the list of things worth burning political capital for. He’d say the right things in private rooms and lose every public fight that mattered, and I would still end up exactly where I currently was.
The mate thing nagged at me anyway, even now, even with my whole body and mind falling apart around. It was an absurd thing to be distracted by. I pushed it down hard, the same way I pushed down everything that didn’t have an immediate use.
What I needed was leverage.
The thought arrived with its own small, cold clarity, and I turned it over slowly, testing its weight. The King’s last words. Whatever they actually were, whatever I’d actually heard versus hallucinated in the fog of blood loss, they were the one thing I had that nobody else had. And Alpha Lysander, whatever else he was, had clearly been close enough to his uncle that the words might mean something to him. It might be enough to make him chase a thread instead of cutting my strings.
It was a gamble built on nothing but maybes. Maybe I’d heard right. Maybe I hadn’t conjured the whole thing in the fog of dying.
But a gamble was better than nothing, and nothing was what I currently had.
I hauled myself to the bars and called out to the sentinel stationed at the corridor’s end.
"Hey." My voice came out rough. I tried again, louder. "I need to speak to Alpha Lysander."
The sentinel turned his head, slow and unimpressed.
"I know what the King said before he died," I said. "It matters. You need to get him down here."
He walked over, slow and deliberate, crouching to bring his face level with mine through the bars.
"You’re a lying little bitch wearing a man’s name," he said, almost pleasantly, "and you killed the only good King this pack has had in forty years." He spat through the bars. It hit my cheek, and I didn’t have the energy left to flinch away from it. "You’ll talk to whoever they send to drag you to your execution. That’s the only conversation you’ve got left."
Something inside me that had lain still for ages finally snapped loose.
"At least I didn’t spend my life on my knees for a paycheck," I said, voice trembling, but my aim true. "You hit women tied up in cells because it’s the only fight you can win. Pathetic."
I didn’t get to finish enjoying it.
The butt of his rifle slammed through the bars and cracked against my temple. The world spun sideways, and the floor rushed up, scattering my thoughts into static.
I lay with my cheek pressed to cold stone, vision swimming, blood warm near my ear, and the darkness behind my eyes began to fill with sound.
A rhyme. The same one. Closer now, clearer than it had been in the library, like the dizziness had knocked something loose enough to let it through whole.
Mother Moon once walked below,
where rivers ran, and wild things grew.
She loved the wolves, she walked as kin,
and swore to guard the blood within.
But claws drew deep, and hearts were torn,
And grief was born before the dawn.
So Mother Moon took up the night,
and wrapped her children in silver light.
Moonlight for the faithful heart,
a blessing no foe can tear apart.
But for the ones who lied, who bled, who preyed,
she carved a darker, hungrier shade.
Beware, beware when daylight dies,
and silver burns in golden eyes.
For when the moon climbs high and white,
the Night children gather, and they bite.
I didn’t know where the words ended, and my own skull began.
I lay on the cell floor, blood in my ear and a dead king’s hum rattling in my skull. Beneath the pain, a stubborn part of me clung to the rhyme like a rope tossed into dark water, because right now, it was the only thing I had that no one else did.
A stupid childhood rhyme.
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