novelraw Chapter 115
Chapter 115
Agnes POV
The stables smelled good.
Hay and leather and animal warmth. I moved through the stalls slowly, running my hand along the wood, looking at each horse with the focused attention of a woman conducting serious business.
No one knew I was here.
That was the first thing I had established upon waking - that the castle, for all its guards and its gates and its general atmosphere of thorough surveillance, had blind spots. Every fortified place had blind spots. The people who built them always forgot to account for someone who had nothing left to lose and a great deal of experience moving through spaces that didn’t want her in them.
I had found four so far.
The stables were blind spot number two.
I stopped in front of a grey mare and studied her legs - the angle of the pastern, the depth of the chest, the stillness in her that meant she was comfortable rather than broken. A broken horse was no good for hard riding. You needed one that was calm because it was confident, not because the spirit had been taken out of it.
I knew the difference.
I had learned it the way I had learned most things in the past year - out of necessity, for protection. Which was important when your husband’s family were werewolves.
You, I thought, looking at the mare. You’ll do for Angel.
Angel, who would argue. Angel, who would tell me she wasn’t trying to escape, who had developed some complicated arrangement with this place that I did not yet fully understand and did not trust. My sister, who had survived everything, who had always been the quiet one, the gentle one, the one who knelt at the altar and meant it - my sister was here, married to a monster, looking at his face with something that frightened me more than the monster himself.
I was going to get her out.
I was going to get both of us out, and I was going to find my son, and I was going to find somewhere the world couldn’t reach us, and I was going to rebuild something from what was left.
But first.
First.
I moved past the grey mare to the end of the row, where the stalls were larger and the horses were larger and the whole arrangement looked like the horses here were given more care than the others. I looked at the animal in the end stall.
And stopped.
He was extraordinary. Dark as a promise - that deep black-brown that looked almost blue in certain light, with the kind of bone structure that made you understand why men had always been willing to go to war over horses. Tall. Deep-chested. The legs of something built to cover ground and keep covering it long after everything else had stopped.
I put my hand on the gate.
He turned and looked at me with his enormous dark eye and I looked back and we conducted a brief mutual assessment.
Fast, I thought. Impossibly fast. This horse could outrun anything on this territory.
I would need that.
For what came after the escape - for the part I hadn’t told Angel about, the part I had no intention of telling Angel about because Angel would try to talk me out of it and I was not in the business of being talked out of things anymore.
Terrell would come after us.
That was simply the truth of the situation, the math of it. He would come after us because Angel was his Luna and because men like that didn’t let things go and because the bond was not something that untied itself when you crossed a border.
So, I couldn’t let him come after us.
I’ll have to kill him first before making my move. One way or the other. He has to die. Although I would’ve preferred if he suffered first, but any kind of death at this point will do. Along with the other brother too.
I had been working through the plan for most of the night on the storeroom floor, while Merrick sat across from me eating bread and doing that thing where he watched without appearing to watch. I had found the edges of the plan in the quiet of the locked room. I had turned it over and examined it from every angle while simultaneously appearing to be simply a woman who was tired and hungry and waiting for someone to open a door.
I was good at that. Appearing to be simply whatever was least threatening.
I had learned that too.
The three men who had taken turns in raping me on the second night of captivity had been asleep by the time I moved. I had waited - not from fear, not from uncertainty, but because I had always understood that patience was the sharpest weapon available to someone without obvious weapons. I had waited until the breathing of all of them were deep.
Then I had been very quiet.
And very thorough with sniffing life out of them.
And I had felt profound satisfaction. Had felt fulfillment and liberation.
Someone had witnessed the whole scene, and I couldn’t let him implicate me, so I’d killed him as well.
After that, my world had reorganized itself around a simple principle: men who did terrible things to me did not continue to exist. It was not complicated. It was not something I spent a great deal of time examining. It was simply the way I lived now.
Humans were easy.
Werewolves were a different problem.
But I was going to solve it.
Somewhere in this territory, or in the territories beyond it, there was something that killed werewolves silently. There had to be. I would find it. I had survived worse odds than find the weapon, learn the method, wait for the moment.
I was patient.
I was very, very patient.
"Are you going to pick one," said a voice behind me, "or did you come just to admire them?"
I turned.
That face.
I felt my jaw tighten - the automatic response, the one I had developed for Terrell’s face, rage and grief and cold fury all arriving at once - and I was already working through which brother this was, looking for the tells, the small differences that distinguished them...
"Merrick," he said easily. "The one from the storeroom."
I held his gaze for a moment.
Then I nodded.
"What are you doing here?" I said.
"I ride," he said. "When the weather’s worth it." He looked at the window at the end of the stable, where the afternoon light was coming in clean and level. "Today the weather’s worth it."
He looked back at me.
"You?" he said.
I said nothing for a moment.
He waited. He was good at that - the waiting, the complete absence of pressure in it, as though he genuinely had nowhere else to be and no particular investment in how I answered.
"I ride too," I said.
"Come on, then."
He walked past me toward the stalls, and I watched him stop in front of the stall at the near end of the row.
His horse.
I looked at it.
Dark bay, strong through the hindquarters, with an energy in the way it shifted its weight that said fast in every line. The horse I had already selected.
I looked at it for two seconds longer than I should have.
Then I turned away and walked slowly down the row with the expression of someone considering options, and noted with satisfaction that my instinct had been correct. If that was his horse - if he rode that one by choice, which a man who knew horses would - then it was the fastest thing in this stable and I had chosen correctly.
I stopped at the large stall at the end.
The black horse looked at me.
I looked back.
I reached for the gate.
"That one’s Terrell’s."
I withdrew my hand.
Not because he told me to. Because the image arrived without warning - the ones that came from the part of my mind that had been on the hill that morning and had kept everything it saw as if carved into stone.
Him on this horse.
This horse, these enormous dark legs, moving through the village at a slow pace - because he hadn’t needed to hurry - and the sword, and the fire, and the laughter...
I stepped back from the gate.
The horse watched me without concern.
I should kill the horse too, I thought, with perfect clarity. A horse that size would cover ground twice as fast as anything else here.
The grey mare two stalls back - Angel’s horse, the one I had selected. I needed to test it after all. I went back to her and opened the gate and she turned toward me.
"This one," I said.
Merrick looked at the mare. Then at me. Something moved through his expression, and then he nodded and went to saddle his own horse, and I saddled mine, and neither of us said anything, and that was fine.