Alpha Father Traded His True Heir for His Bastard Daughter Now Karma's Ultimate Payback novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Breakfast With the Prosecutor

Faye arrives at Stonegate warm and kind to Jasper and demands the key to Mark's room. Jasper refuses, and Faye tells Calla her parents are on their way.

I slept on the floor of the guest wing with my back against the unlocked door.

In five years of silver I had never once been allowed a bed, and my body did not know how to take one.

At dawn I went down to the kitchen anyway, because I owed this house a year and a day and I meant to start on time.

A broad woman at the stove looked at my wrists and then at my face.

She put a plate of eggs on the counter so hard it cracked.

"Eat, killer," she said.

"Thank you," I said, and ate every bite standing up.

She watched me do it.

Her mouth twitched, and she turned back to the stove.

"Where do I start?" I asked.

"Woodpile behind the barn. Alpha says you split what the pack burns."

"Then I'll split it."

"Hands like yours?" she said. "You'll bleed."

"Then I'll bleed on it."

She grunted, and she did not say killer again.

I was rinsing the plate when I heard a car on the gravel, and then a second, and then the doors of a third.

Four enforcers in Council black came up the porch steps behind a woman in a cream coat.

Faye.

She carried two paper cups of coffee and a leather folder, and her copper hair was pinned up for the day.

Jasper met her at the door.

I had not known his face could soften, and it did, for her.

"Jas," she said, and kissed his cheek. "You look terrible. Did you sleep at all?"

"A little."

"Liar." She pushed a cup into his hand. "Black, two sugars. I remembered."

He took it.

Something low in my chest rose up and showed its teeth.

My wolf, silent for five years, picked that moment to growl at the woman in the cream coat.

I called it hate, because that was the only name I would give it.

"I'm sorry to come so early," Faye said. "The Council wants Mark's room inventoried, and I wanted to do it myself, for him. Nobody else would be careful."

Her eyes slid past Jasper's shoulder to the staircase.

"The key, Jas. Please."

"Thursday," he said.

"The order says today."

"The order says Thursday. I read it twice." He drank the coffee. "Nobody opens that room before then."

Faye's smile held, but her fingers tightened on her folder.

"Of course," she said softly. "I'd never rush you. Not about Mark."

She laid her hand on his arm.

"Faye," I said.

She turned and saw me by the kitchen door.

"Calla! Are they feeding you? You're so thin."

"Where were you the night of the Border Moon?"

The hallway got quiet.

Jasper's head came up.

"The Council library, sister," Faye said, in her warmest voice. "I was filing until midnight. It's in the log, and Jasper's seen the log."

"It is," Jasper said.

He did not look at me when he said it.

"Calla's had a hard day," Faye told him. "She'll say anything about anyone just now, and I forgive her. Would you give us a minute? Girl talk."

Jasper hesitated, then nodded and walked the enforcers toward the porch.

The second he was out of earshot, Faye's smile did not leave, but her voice dropped.

"Thank you again, for real," she said. "Father said you'd cry in the car. You just nodded and signed."

I did not move.

"I'm going to marry into Stonegate, you know," she went on, in a pleasant whisper. "Jasper's lonely, and he trusts me. So here's what I'd like. You serve your year, you keep your mouth shut about the knife, and you stay out of my way."

"Whose knife was it, Faye?"

"Yours. It's in the record." She patted my cheek. "You signed it, remember."

She turned toward the door.

I went after her.

I don't know what I'd have done with my hands, because I never found out.

A hand closed around my wrist, on the old scar, and pulled me up short.

"No," Jasper said.

He had come back inside without a sound.

His thumb was on the exact place the silver cuff had burned deepest, and the touch ran all the way up my arm.

I saw his pupils blow wide.

"Don't threaten the one person who got me justice," he said, very low.

"I wasn't threatening her."

"You were about to."

He let go at once.

I rubbed my wrist.

The heat stayed there, and neither of us said anything about it.

Faye walked down the steps to her car with her hand lifted in a little wave.

At the open door she stopped and called back across the gravel, brightly, for the whole porch to hear.

"Oh, Calla! Your mama and papa are driving up tonight to take you home. Isn't that sweet?"

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