Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,37

have to.

If it was the children that Jack thought it was—two named for him, one for Gregor, and the last after their dear, dead ma—the prophets had pulled the fangs of Da’s loyalists. Kath was the only one who had what it took to lead, but the others would have backed her.

Would have.

So the kids had been taken to sideline them while Lach and his pack had been seduced by empty promises from the gods, filtered through a prophet’s scarred lips.

“Fuck,” Jack said.

Millie gave him a thin, tired smile. “If the wolves don’t know how to fight,” she said, “what’s a dog to do but what they’re told, and hope for the best?”

She gave him the courtesy of a pause to give him a chance to answer, but she didn’t look surprised when he had nothing to say. Along with the other dogs, she turned away, either to curl up against the wall or pace the length of her chain.

“There’s a plan,” Tom said. He’d found his faith in the prophets again as they talked, plastered desperately over that hollow center of doubt. “There’s always been a plan. Who were wolves to think they could deny it?”

While Gregor cursed Tom out, anger and frustration raw in his voice, Jack pulled impatiently at his new collar. He could taste the Wild in the back of his throat—sour, Hector had said, but it was grease and smoke on Jack’s tongue—but he let it fade away again. The Wild could do a lot of things, but it could no more unlock a padlock than it could start a car.

The Old Man had said that if he came back, he’d end up here, caged for the prophets. Jack should have listened.

He found a spot on the wall and crouched down on the balls of his feet. The wolf itched under his skin, eager to shift, and he let it. If it came down to it, Jack thought bleakly as he rubbed his fingers over the cold metal, he’d rather strangle his wolf himself than go under a prophet’s knife again.

He was afraid, and all the shame in the world couldn’t shift it from his bones.

Chapter Eight—Jack

“HERE,” GREGOR said as he slid down the wall to sit next to Jack. He handed Jack the battered, now-empty mug. It had taken him a while to work out his black, caustic mood on Tom and the walls. His voice was tattered, and his hands bruised, skin split and shredded over the bony jut of his knuckles. Careless. Even a dog would realize there was something wrong when the Numitor’s son’s knuckles scabbed over instead of healed. “Recognize it?”

Jack turned the mug in his hand. There was a fresh chip on the rim, and the cup was greasy with the residue of spilled coffee and dirty, sweaty hands. But even in the dim light of the cell, Jack could make out the bright, aggressive green of the glazed paint.

“It’s Da’s,” Jack said. Coffee in the morning or whiskey in the evening, his da had drunk it out of this mug. A sour laugh squeezed out of his chest as he leaned his head back against the cold stones. “That’s fucking pathetic.”

Gregor snorted his agreement.

Da had smashed enough cups against the wall or floor from carelessness or temper. Or he used to catch rusty brown water from a drip in the pipes under the toilet or filled it with white spirit and vinegar to get rust off something. Once he’d used it to brew the mountain ash gall to ink a new wolf into the Pack, then sent Danny to buy a new one because his coffee gave him the shits after.

Only an idiot would think that the Old Man—dead or gone—would give a damn what anyone did with a cup he didn’t have to drink out of. That was Lach, though.

“He broke your dog’s ankle once,” Gregor said. “Left him to crawl down from the hills on his own.”

Jack paused for a second as a mixture of anger and jealousy twisted sickly in his stomach. He’d never fought Danny’s battles for him. Da wouldn’t have stood for that. Even dogs had to be able to stand up for themselves to stay in the Pack, but what Gregor had said sounded more like torture than a fight.

“He never told me that,” Jack said once he’d swallowed the sour bubble of bile back down. “I would have—”

“Made it worse,” Gregor said. “Lach threatened Bron if Danny told anyone, told him