Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,35

side.”

“Stay to heel, you mean,” Gregor said with contempt. He shoved Tom back against the wall and turned to Jack. “They promised me your throat and the Pack.”

Jack gave Gregor a thin smile. “To me too,” he said. “And they gave Lach the Pack too, along with a promise they’d protect him.”

“In Girvan they offered to save the children,” Gregor said. There was a bite to his voice as he glanced around the shadowy cell. “But the children still died, and I’m not the Numitor.”

Or a wolf, but Jack held his tongue on that. If the threat of his brother’s fangs helped to keep people in line, Jack would use it for now.

“And my brother’s still alive, and Lachlan might call himself Numitor, but the fuck he is,” Jack said. The steadiness of his voice made Tom squirm as he looked away and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “The prophets make a lot of promises, try to be all things to all people, but they can’t keep all of them. Once they don’t need to keep you in line anymore—”

The stranger’s cracked voice interrupted him. “Then they’ll pull out your teeth, slice off your skin, and only when they’re done do they cut your throat.”

Uneasy silence fell over the cell as the stranger’s voice cracked in a sob and he covered his face. The dogs shuffled their feet, and Jack turned away from the raw grief that squeezed through the man’s fingers. He couldn’t let himself see it, or feel pity for it, or it might seem real.

It wasn’t—it wouldn’t be—Jack’s pain. He wouldn’t be left cracked open for his pain to leak out like blood in the water. He’d find Danny, whole and irritating and Jack’s, like he’d been since Jack first realized he wanted the lanky, older boy. Dog or not.

“Lies,” Tom said, but his voice wasn’t quite so sure. “And if it did happen, the prophets had their reasons.”

Without looking around, Gregor reached back and grabbed Tom’s jaw between thumb and forefinger. He squeezed down hard until the only sound Tom could get out was a whimper.

“Their reasons, not ours,” Gregor said. “Since when do we trust the fucking prophets?”

Millie pulled a crumpled square of old cotton out of her sleeve and awkwardly offered it to the stranger as he groaned against his palms. He ignored it, and the tattered handkerchief dangled pathetically from Millie’s finger. Maybe humans weren’t the only ones who clung to the ideas of the pre-Winter world.

“What else can we do?” Millie asked. She balled up the handkerchief in her hand, her knuckles white against chapped skin as she squeezed. “Do you think no one said those things when the prophets came down from the hills and started to make demands? That none of the wolves told them to fuck off? The Old Man sent them away with a flea in their ear. Laughed them back into the storm. Maybe that’s—”

She stopped, her mouth pursed around the words that wanted to get out.

“Killed him,” Jack said for her.

An unhappy growl creaked out of Gregor’s chest at the blunt statement, but he didn’t argue. The idea that Da was dead and they hadn’t known, not felt it echo through their blood like a drum, seemed impossible. Except no one had thought someone could find the Sannock Dead or that a prophet could stitch a dead wolf to their back and run in their skin.

It was the Wolf Winter, and a lot of things were possible. Jack didn’t believe it, not yet, but Da could be dead. He didn’t know how he felt about that. It was his da. He’d spent his whole life on the hunt for the Old Man’s approval—and the flip-side disapproval of Gregor—but he also knew that one day he might have to kill his da. On some level he’d always accepted that.

Yet it still felt wrong to admit that his da’s death would grieve him, but that Danny’s would destroy him.

It was a weakness, and Da had always said the Numitor couldn’t afford weakness.

“Maybe they just locked him somewhere,” Hector said. It was obviously an attempt at kindness, not something he believed. “We don’t know.”

“Dead or trapped,” Millie said. “Either way, the Old Man was gone, and that’s when the prophets came back. They had dogs on leashes—”

“And empty leashes too,” the stranger said without looking up from his knees. “Bloody ones. Plenty of those.”

“They told them to round us up,” Millie said. “That the gods wanted us. No