Page 4

Then the wind shifted, and a scent touched the inner corners of my noise, lightly.

It was faint, worn almost to nothing by hours of open air, but it clung to the shaft where a bare hand had gripped it. My body understood right away,what it was before my mind consented to the knowledge.

Wild lavender moved beneath pine and the clean mineral sweetness of coming rain, and underneath all of it ran something warmer and softer that had no business on a weapon.

An Omega…

Instinct surged up through me with a violence I had not felt in years, sudden and total, a pressure behind my ribs demanding that I follow that scent into the trees and not stop until I found its source. My canines ached and my grip tightened around the shaft until the wood creaked.

I crushed the instinct back down with the same cold hand I used on everything else inside me, because I had not spent a lifetime building control to lose it on a roadside in front of my own soldiers.

"Leave us," I said with a slight wave of my hand.

The nearest men hesitated, glancing at each other. "Sheriff?"

"Now…”

They cleared the road at a pace just short of running, and when the last of them had withdrawn beyond the bend, I lifted the arrow again and breathed in slowly, deliberately, confirming what I already knew.

There was no mistaking it.

The fucking Ghost of Sherwood, the outlaw who had humiliated the Crown for three years while bleeding its coffers and outmaneuvering every garrison in the shire, was an Omega.

I stood on the empty road time, while that truth rearranged everything I thought I knew.

Then I wrapped the arrow in oilcloth, tucked it into my saddlebag, and rode for Nottingham.

Night found me in my office as I starred at maps I’d pinned along the western castle walls.

I had marked every robbery attributed to the Ghost. Every location and every date, three years of raids rendered in ink and thread. The candles burned low while I drew my lines from strike to strike, and slowly, the way a face emerges from shadow, the pattern surfaced.

The raids clustered along supply routes in the weeks before winter and before tax collections, when the villages would be their most desperate. Every village that had reported mysterious gifts of grain, coin, or medicine sat within a night's ride of a raid that preceded it. And through all of it, one absence spoke louder than any strike, because in three years the Ghost had never once touched the estates of the minor nobility who were known to feed their tenants through hard winters.

"You're not stealing," I murmured to the empty room, tracing another thread from a raided convoy to a village that had survived a famine no one could explain.

I drew another line. "You're feeding them."

Another line, and another, until the wall stopped looking like a map of crimes and started looking like a campaign. The timing of the strikes, and the discipline of the raiders, the selection of targets by value to the people rather than value in gold… all of it moved with a logic I recognized from war rather than from crime.

My eyes narrowed at the web of thread. "Who taught you strategy Little Ghost?”

Someone had taught her military strategy and she had wrapped it up in banditry, disguising it.

It was military precision in service of a moral code, and the woman behind it was conducting the most disciplined campaign I had seen since the border wars.

She was doing it with farmers and poachers against the full weight of the Crown.

I should have felt fury. Instead, what I felt while staring at that wall in the candlelight, was something far more dangerous, and I chose not to name it.

The summons came the next morning.

The King received me in his private council chamber with only one other man in attendance. I marked that fact the moment I crossed the threshold, because Lord Edmund Fitzwalter did not attend private councils about common outlaws.

His Majesty paced before the fire in a fury that had clearly been building for hours, while Fitzwalter sat at perfect ease near the window with wine he never drank. He remainedcalm in the like aman watching events unfold exactly as he’d arranged them.

That calm interested me and I filed it away in the back of my mind.

"Three years," the King snapped. "Three years that this criminal makes a mockery of my roads. A mockery of my taxes, and my law, and now my own suppressant shipments have vanished into that cursed forest. I am finished waiting, Bisbane. Whatever you require, take it. Whatever it costs, spend it. Burn Sherwood to the ground if necessary…”