No, wait. I was wrong. Someone else had come. I spotted a carriage in the distance, half-hidden by the fog. A man stood beside it, his jewel-encrusted hand resting on the edge of the door to the carriage. His long, silvery hair was tied back from his face. He had a hawkish nose and full, pouting lips that sneered so perfectly we used to whisper among ourselves during his speeches that he must practice the look in front of his mirror to get it right.
Governor Creeb.
He’d come to watch Neil die.
The hangman was still speaking the sentence. “—Of seditious acts against the Alpha and his kingdom, and for transcribing treasonous words upon a government building.”
Neil grinned. He was still waiting for his rescue.
The hangman placed the noose around Neil’s neck.
This was my moment. Fear shot through my limbs like a jolt of electricity. I wet my lips and stepped forward, summoning every ounce of courage I possessed as I opened my mouth and prepared to bring every eye upon me.
“Wait,” I called.
Neil’s eyes fell upon me. In the distance, the governor’s head swiveled in my direction.
The hangman looked bored. Tired. As if this were all some pointless charade.
“I am here to formally protest the execution of Neil Grimmick,” I said, the words I’d memorized the night before stumbling off my tongue. “For reasons of illegitimacy.”
“And what illegitimacy is that?” the hangman asked.
Neil gazed at me sharply, alert now. He had been expecting a rescue from his friends. Not this.
He didn’t know that they weren’t coming, that they’d been arrested too. There was no plan. His friends had not been able to make one. Two of them were still inebriated from the night before that had gotten him into this mess, and the others were cooling their heels in the jail across town. They’d been caught after him.
There was only me. Me and my ill-advised, hare-brained plan to save him. It wasn’t the flashy, heroic, resistance fighter-style of Neil’s friends. I didn’t have arrows or swords. I didn’t have gas canisters.
But I did have something of value. A secret, one Neil didn’t know.
“What—what are you doing, Red?” Neil said slowly. As if he were stringing his understanding together bead by bead.
“He didn’t write those things,” I said. I forced the words out, knowing I could not go back once I had spoken them. Dread dropped like stones into my lungs. I couldn’t breathe.
“No?” the hangman asked.
“No,” I said. “Because I wrote them, and I’m here to surrender in his place.”
There was a heavy, silent moment.
“Red?” Neil called, his voice breaking with alarm. “Red! No! This isn’t the plan!”
I refused to look at him, lest I lose my resolve.
In the distance, I saw Governor Creeb frowning as he watched.
Creeb was not fond of changes to the plan. But of course, he wanted the perpetrator punished. He was a stickler like that. He gave a nod to the hangman.
The Sworn came forward and took me by the arms, one on each side as if I were a threat, a dangerous criminal who needed to be restrained. Their gloved hands were strong, their fingers crushing my upper arms in powerful grips that elicited a gasp from my mouth before I could stifle it.
The hangman unceremoniously lifted the noose off Neil’s neck and shoved him aside.
“You’re free to go,” the hangman said. “Get off the platform.”
“I don’t understand,” Neil said, desperate now. “I was the one who was arrested.”
“And she just confessed. We have our traitor. Now go.”
The Sworn marched me toward the steps, past the other prisoners with their mouths hanging open, their expressions a mixture of surprise and pity at what was about to happen to me.
I took the final steps alone and stopped before the dangling noose. The hangman looked me over with a little more respect now. And pity.
“Sorry, girlie,” he said as he lifted the rope.
The rope settled around my neck. I closed my eyes—a flutter—and took a deep breath. They hadn’t bound my hands yet, so the hangman stepped around to my front to do it. He turned over my right wrist and swore under his breath. His face turned white as ash, and he stepped back as if he were afraid to touch me.
“Why aren’t you wearing your colors? Why didn’t you say what you are?” he hissed. “I didn’t know! I could have killed you!”
The Sworn at the steps lifted their heads at his words. Their blank, covered faces glittered in the sun, and my stomach curled into a knot.
On my wrist, a raised red mark of two circles overlapping lay like a hideous birthmark. Like the body of a dead snake. Like a brand. A hateful, ugly, jarring scar of a tattoo.
You see, I had a secret. One I’d hidden for years from everyone, including my friends, even my beloved Neil. Only my grandmother had known the truth. Only she had seen the mark I always kept carefully hidden.
Only she had known I was one of the Chosen.
CHAPTER TWO
THE HANGMAN HASTILY removed the noose from my neck and stepped back as if he wanted to get as far away from me as possible as the Sworn ascended the steps and closed around me, whether protectively or menacingly, I couldn’t tell.
I was Chosen, but I was not untouchable.
Where he stood, Neil was staring at me as if I’d grown fangs. He clutched both hands, still bound together, to his chest. “Red?” he asked uncertainly. “What is going on?”
I’d always kept the mark hidden. Always. I’d worn leather wrist sheaths for my knives over it, or artfully wound cotton strips that I claimed was the latest fashion of my own invention, or even, when necessary, I smeared clay on my skin and told anyone who asked that I’d been shaping pots for my grandmother to cook with. Neil had never touched the bare skin of my wrist. I’d never allowed him to so much as brush his fingers across the skin of my arm during one of our trysts in his father’s barn. It was my eternal dirty secret, that even as I ran aided those who opposed the Alpha’s regime, I was one of the cogs that would one day keep it running. I was one of the dirty bitches they hated so much, one of those human traitors destined to birth Sworn babies to the oppressors that ruled us.
My friends had never known, because I was clever and careful.
The governor descended from his carriage and strode toward us. He reached the bottom of the platform and gazed up at the cluster of individuals standing at the top—Neil, standing in shock, the hangman, who was turning his head from side to side as if looking for an escape, and the Sworn, both of them seething now. The scene had changed from the execution of a few filthy human resistance fighters to a threat to one of their Chosen girls, and that was not something the Sworn took lightly.
“What’s going on?” the governor demanded. He had a nasal sound to his voice that normally grated my nerves, but I was numb to it this morning. “Why have you halted the execution?”
The Sworn stared down at him. They were silent. They usually were.
“She is a Chosen,” the hangman stammered.
Creeb swore in a similar manner to the hangman earlier. He put a manicured hand to his head. I noticed his nails were long, groomed in the fashion of the weres. An effort to be like them? What a miserable cur he was. Even in the grip of my terror, I was disgusted by him.