Page 185 of A Warrior's Fate

Isla couldn’t really imagine Callan coming out here. But the map… “Maybe.”

“This stone isn’t natural,” Ameera noted, running her hand over the smooth, grayish surface of the columns built along the mouth. She scratched at a particularly marred part of the rock. “It looks like there used to be some type of door or gate here too. This is here for a reason…but why would anyone need or want a path into the Wilds?”

The ridged grip of the blade’s hilt bit into Isla’s palm as she held it tighter.

Back in the Wilds. This could lead her straight back into the Wilds. Earthbound, eternal hell.

I have us—the words she’d sworn to Kai echoed in her head. She’d assured him, and she would. Them, and everyone else. A vulnerability like this could put the whole pack at risk.

“When we go back to the hall, we’ll look into the archives and figure out who used to live here.” She steeled and stepped forward. “Let’s see what we can find inside. We won’t go far.”

Ameera nodded, and Isla noted the anxious twitch of her fingers. “Are we shifting?”

Isla gulped, squeezing the metal in her hand even harder. “I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“Something that the rogue had in a vial, I think, messed with my wolf. I’ve felt it before—a while ago, back in Callisto when Lukas had tried to kill me. I think the dagger had been laced with it somehow. And now, the rogue—”

“Like wolfsbane?”

“No. I’ve never been dosed with wolfsbane, but I think it’s something different—maybe worse,” Isla conceded. “I look fine, but my wolf…I just feel disconnected. The pain subsided, but something’s wrong.”

Ameera went rigid.

Isla lofted a brow. “What?”

She grimaced. “It kind of sounds like what Kai was saying. How he felt that night. The disconnection, the pain, but looking perfectly fine.”

Isla’s features fell, and her stomach bottomed out. “I—I hadn’t…”

A poison. Fast-acting. Quick healing. No trace as it destroyed from the inside.

It made sense.

The overwhelming urge suddenly overcame Isla to tear her skin away and claw it out of her.

The right amount could kill an alpha and heir without drawing alarm. And they’d used it on her. Twice.

Ameera's face was drawn in puzzlement. “How did the rogue get it?”

Isla growled low in her throat and sneered, starting straight down the tunnel. The general’s footsteps echoed hollowly from behind her, around her.

Bold or stupid—maybe she was both.

It was possible that Isla was taking this assassin’s passivity and graciousness in not murdering her a bit too far.

“I don’t know exactly where he got it," she said, hoping that around the corner, the killer was waiting. "But I know who probably does.”

The path ended at a crossroads. No shadowy figures in sight. To Isla's left, the tunnel either banked down and down and down…or the right offered a continuous spiral to who knew where. Them splitting up wasn’t even close to an option. They'd need to go back and gather more people before trying to really tackle something like this. The guard. Kai.

Isla inclined her head to garner Ameera’s opinion on which direction they should take—

And then she saw it.

Wedged into the rock wall to the left, a couple of feet down. A tiny beacon of wood and inscriptions that haunted her dreams and nightmares, waking and asleep.

A marker.

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