Chapter 8 The Gate at Dawn

Chapter 8: Chapter 8 The Gate at Dawn

Talia’s POV

Dawn came gray and cold. I stood by the cart with my mother’s trunk, looking back at Cresswood one last time.

Fifteen years inside those walls. The storage room. The kitchen. Every locked door, and every morning when no one said my name. I had imagined this moment a thousand times, and I had always imagined hatred. What I felt instead was lighter than that. Almost nothing. Like setting down a weight I had carried so long it had become my bones.

Kaelen did not look at me. He looked at the road, then at Silas.

"Move out."

One word. Flat. Final. He had not looked at me once since the bathroom, and I told myself I preferred it that way.

The cart lurched forward. And that was when I saw her.

Piper.

She came out of the shadow of the gatepost, eyes red, shawl thin against the dawn, a small cloth bundle pressed against her chest.

"How did you know we would leave so early?" I asked.

"Servants hear everything," Piper said. "And I have been here since the first bird, in case they did not."

The cart slowed. A guard stepped forward, but Piper was faster. She shoved the bundle into my arms before anyone could stop her.

"You never leave yourself a way out," she said, fast and low. "So I left one for you."

Inside the cloth I felt hard bread, a knife, and something else—something flat, wrapped too carefully.

Piper’s cheeks went red. "Don’t open that one until you’re alone. Tonight. Before he comes to bed."

"Piper—"

"Every girl should know, and no one ever told you." Her voice cracked, then steadied. "Listen. Servants hear things. Let me tell you what I heard about the Alpha of Shadowfang."

The guard was coming closer. She spoke faster.

"They say he never touches the women they offer him. They say his wolf answers to only one." Her eyes flicked to Kaelen’s back. "They say when a Shadowfang Alpha finally claims his mate, the bond drives him mad with her scent. That he doesn’t leave the bedroom for days."

My face burned. Because I heard it—and all I could think of was a strangled sound in a bathroom, and white knuckles on a doorframe.

"And two years ago," Piper whispered, gripping my hand, "he vanished for a week. He came back bleeding—claw marks, but no wolf in Shadowfang could have made them. After that, no one was allowed in his chambers. No one."

The guard’s hand fell on her shoulder. She shook it off, but her eyes never left mine.

"If he finds out what you’re hiding—"

She never finished. The cart was moving again.

"Send word," she called after me, smaller and smaller. "Promise me!"

"I promise," I whispered, and the gate of Cresswood closed between us.

I added her name to the list behind my teeth. Not as a debt. As a promise.

Silas gathered the reins as the road opened before us. "Two nights on the road," he said, more to the horses than to us. "Camp tonight, once more past the ridge, and Blackmoor Valley by noon the day after."

"Two nights?" Jax frowned, riding up beside the cart. "It was one when I last rode it."

"The gorge road is no place to be after dark," Silas said. His eyes stayed on the trees. "Not anymore."

When the walls were far enough away, I opened the bundle.

The bread and the knife I set aside. The wrapped thing, I unfolded slowly.

And slammed it back down.

My face was on fire. My breath came wrong. I looked at the road. I looked at Kaelen’s back. I looked back down.

I forced myself to look again.

It was a book of paintings. A woman and a man. And what they were—what they were doing to each other—

Fifteen years of floors and cellars, of locked rooms and empty plates, and no one—no one—had ever told me this was part of what mates did.

I closed the book so fast I nearly tore a page, and shoved it into the deepest fold of my shawl. Piper had been right. No one had ever told me.

On the last page, in her crooked hand, was one line:

’He will want to bite you at the end. Let him.’

I stopped breathing.

’Let him.’

Three steps away sat the man whose wolf—if Piper was right—had been waiting two years for exactly that.

I pulled my shawl tighter and did not look at him for a very long time.

Jax, riding beside the cart, tried to make conversation twice. I answered him with silence both times, still burning from what was hidden in my shawl. He raised his hands and gave up.

The cart was small and closed against the morning cold, and every time my heart stumbled, I heard it the way a hunted thing hears its own noise. The charm had cost itself something last night. I knew that now. And whatever it had cost, some part of whatever it hid had loosened.

Kaelen’s shoulders went stiff. Just once. His hands tightened on the reins until the leather creaked.

Then his voice came back to me, flat and deliberate.

"Open the curtain. Let the air in."

I opened it, hurt in a way I refused to examine. So I was too much. So even my presence in a closed cart was something to be aired out.

What I did not see was this—though I learned it later: the wind through the curtain carried my scent away from him, and his wolf had been pulling toward it since dawn. He was not airing out the cart.

He was airing out himself.

I put my hand on my mother’s trunk to steady myself, and it answered—warm, with that low pulse like something breathing inside the wood. It had done that before.

But this time I noticed something I had never noticed.

Every time my eyes drifted to Kaelen’s back, the warmth rose.

I pulled my hand away and did not touch it again. I did not want to know what that meant.

The sun climbed. I kept my eyes on the road and my thoughts on Piper’s book, on her warnings, on one line in crooked handwriting, and I did not look at Kaelen, and he did not look at me, and somewhere between us sat every word neither of us had said since the bathroom door closed.

Late in the afternoon, Cain came back.

He had been riding ahead since midday, and now he did not slow when he reached the cart, and his face was wrong.

He leaned down to Kaelen and spoke low. I should not have been able to hear. I heard.

"Tracks on the road ahead. And a scent."

Kaelen did not turn his head. "...Not wolf?"

"No, Alpha." Cain’s voice went quieter. "Not wolf. And it’s not ahead of us."

The cart felt colder.

"It’s been behind us since before dawn."

’Since before dawn.’

Since before dawn, we had been leaving Cresswood. Since before dawn, something that was not a wolf had been following.

My blood went still. One thought surfaced, clear as a blade.

Kaelen had not moved our departure up because of what happened in the bathroom.

Or maybe—he had done it for both reasons.