Chapter 135

Liam

Owen was on Sloane’s door.

He had been on it, on and off, for over a week. Kade had never said she could come out, and Ryan hadn’t asked him, and so the order had sat there, the way orders do in a packhouse when everyone is too busy to remember them. She went out at night with Imogen, inside the line, with a wolf at the hedge. She came back. Owen sat on a hard chair outside Cassandra’s spare room and read the same paperback he had been reading since the reception.

He stood up when he saw me.

“Beta.”

“Take a walk, Owen.”

He looked at the door. Then at me. “Ryan said—”

“Ryan says a lot of things. Get yourself some breakfast. I’ll be twenty minutes.”

He went, with the book under his arm, looking back once from the end of the corridor.

I stood outside the door for a while before I knocked. I had told Kade I would do this. I had told myself, walking up from the council room, that it was easy. Ask her a question. Get an ans