Chapter 378 I Already Named Him, Garrett
Agnes closed her eyes.
The trees were dark around her.
Andrew’s weight was warm against her chest. The matebond was carrying Garrett’s emotions with a clarity that meant he was close, miles rather than leagues, and every second she spent arguing was a second he was moving toward a compound designed to kill him.
She gave him the location. The northwestern edge of the Blackwood Forest, still three miles from the compound’s outer ward line. She added the details that mattered.
Agnes:The compound wards block portals for three miles in every direction. I cannot shift. The silver suppressed my wolf and it hasn’t come back yet. My wrists are burned. I can move, but I am slower than I should be.
She paused, looking down.
Agnes: I am also carrying a boy. He is unconscious. He cannot walk and I am bringing him with me. This is a nonnegotiable point and I will argue about it for as long as it takes.
Garrett’s emotions came through the matebond.
Agnes flinched.
The warmth that had been humming through the connection for the last three minutes was gone. What replaced it was anger, and the anger was so aggressive, so total, so fundamentally unlike anything she had ever felt from Garrett Darkhowler that she blinked and checked herself, wondering if the emotion was hers bleeding into the connection rather than his feeding through it.
It wasn’t hers.
Agnes ran a quick internal inventory. Was she furious? Yes. Was she this furious? No. This was Garrett’s fury wearing Garrett’s face, and it looked wrong on him, like formal armor on a golden retriever.
Garrett was furious.
The fury was hot and clean and carried a weight that pressed against her ribs through the matebond with a force she had never experienced from him, because this man did not get angry, this man resolved, this man de-escalated, this man found the honorable path through every conflict and walked it with the earnest conviction of a king who believed in things like teamwork and doing the right thing.
The man on the other end of the matebond right now would have made Tiberon Drakenfell take a step back.
Agnes mindlinked again, fast.
Agnes:Garrett, please listen. Do not be mad. The boy was going to die. First-time runners get the pillory overnight and whipped at dawn. I freed him, which makes him a second-time runner, and second-time runners get silver collars. I already decided I am keeping him. We are a packaged deal. If that is a problem, we can discuss it when I am somewhere warm, but the discussion will be short because my mind is made up and I will be unreasonable about it.
The matebond was still carrying fury. Unchanged. Undimmed. If anything, it had intensified, which made no sense, because she had just delivered a compelling justification for child rescue and Garrett Darkhowler was the single most compassionate man she had ever met and should have been responding with the enthusiasm of a man who had just been told he was adopting a puppy.
Was the puppy the problem? Agnes reviewed the speech. The speech was solid. Garrett Darkhowler loved children and justice and doing the right thing. This was all three at once.
She’d beg if she had to.
Agnes:I know this is a lot to process. I know the timing is bad. But I need you to understand that I have already named him.
His voice came back. Quiet. Controlled. Carrying a precision that Agnes recognized as the specific calibration Garrett’s voice achieved when the anger was so deep that volume became unnecessary.
Garrett:Agnes.
Agnes:Yes?
Garrett:Your father put you in silver.
Oh.
The realization moved through Agnes’s body like a wave breaking on shore: sudden, total, reshaping the landscape it touched. He wasn’t angry about the boy. He hadn’t been angry about the boy for a single second.
The fury that was burning through the matebond, the hot, clean, un-Garrett rage that had made her flinch, was about the silver. About the burns on her wrists. About the particular cruelty of a father who had cuffed his own daughter in a metal designed to suppress and torture wolves and had left her in it long enough to blister.
He wasn’t mad at her.
He was going to destroy her father.
Agnes:Don’t worry about that, Garrett. I promise, I’m alright.
The sentence was a stretch and they both knew it. Neither of them addressed it, because the alternative was Agnes admitting she was standing in a freezing forest with burned wrists and a split lip and a stolen child and a baby she hadn’t told him about. That particular piece of information was sitting in a sealed vault inside.
The compound alarms sounded.
The sound cut through the forest from three miles away, muffled by distance and trees but unmistakable: a low, cycling horn that Agnes had heard a hundred times growing up. The missing-slave alarm.
A sound designed to mobilize search parties and close perimeter gaps and alert every patrol captain within a mile that inventory was short.
Agnes looked down at Andrew, still unconscious against her chest.
The alarm wasn’t for the boy.
She knew because the horn pattern was wrong. A missing slave triggered a three-pulse cycle. A missing asset, a person of operational value to House Viremont, triggered a five-pulse cycle.
The horn was cycling five. The asset was Agnes, and the compound was waking up, and every wolf in her father’s employ was about to be running through the forest she was standing in.
She rolled her eyes. Wonderful they noticed. Only took them, what, thirty-two minutes? None of them checked the goddamn study until now because none of them thought she could do anything.
She hoped they appreciated the lockpicking. That was artisan-level work with a decorative pin and burned wrists.
She started running.
Agnes:Took them long enough. I hope they are embarrassed.
Garrett:Agnes.
Agnes: What? I’m just saying.
The matebond carried a very specific emotion from Garrett that Agnes had never felt before. It took her a moment to identify it. It was love and fury and exasperation arriving at the exact same time.
Garrett: Run. Now. I’m coming.
Agnes: Obviously I’m running. I was running before the alarm. I’m multitasking, Garrett. I am a woman. We do this.