I blinked at her, my eyes raw and my body aching. “You asked me if he’d given me the rose.”

“I wasn’t sure then if it had taken root. Later, I thought I’d been mistaken, but that wasn’t why I took you.” She removed her hand, and my cheek burned with cold without her touch. “I took you because your father loved you, and because the only thing crueler than losing one you love is living with that loss. Death would have been a mercy.”

I should have felt something at her words. Instead, I felt empty. Numb. “Will I die?” I asked her.

“Not from this,” she said, lifting my hand to examine the damage I’d inflicted on myself. “And not by my hand, or by yours, if I can help it.” That strange, sad smile was still on her lips. “And not by briar. They are just thorns, Rowan, and roses. Nothing more.”

The wolf rested his head in her lap. He had decided to live through the night, despite his wounds.

“And I have lived despite mine,” she told him.

She had thought she would rage against it, when the time came. She had thought she would fight it tooth and nail, snarling with her pack around her, not curled up like this, roses in her back, a wolf in her lap and a stranger’s name on her lips.

Rowan.

She saw the elegance of the witch’s trap. It had been there all along, and she had sprung it with one act of mercy. She should have killed him, she thought for the hundredth time.

But she hadn’t.

“. . . its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”

“What will become of you?” she asked the wolf. “What will become of you, when all this comes undone?”

He closed his eyes, his tongue lolling as he panted, and didn’t answer. She let her hand rest above the soft curve of his ear.

There was nothing to rage against.

She remembered the way the girl had felt, sobbing in her arms. She remembered the way she smelled, and the feel of her hair, and the odd tightening she had felt in her own chest as Rowan’s fear and grief spilled down her breast.

She did not know what came next. She had never fully understood the witch’s words, and it was far too late now to ask, but she knew one thing for certain: she could not kill the girl, even if so doing could save her. Even if it meant the end.

“Even if it meant your life?” she asked the wolf. “What would I choose then?”

She didn’t have an answer, only the smell of steel as a long-rusted trap sprang shut.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten