Chapter 12: The Gathering

Ingrid's POV

Two hundred wolves stood in the meadow with the sun going down behind them.

They had come on foot from every side of Hollowbrook land, and nobody had told them why.

Hazel sat on my hip with her chin on my shoulder, and Orin stood against my leg with a fistful of my coat.

"Why is everybody so quiet?" Hazel whispered.

"Because your father asked them to come," I said.

"He's going to do something loud."

"Probably."

On the far side of the grass there was a flat grey rock the size of a kitchen table.

Briony stood on it in a white dress, with her blonde hair down and her pale gold bracelet catching the last light.

She saw me and smiled, the same bright smile she had given me in a hallway when I was nineteen.

I looked at the bracelet and did not smile back.

Torin walked out to the foot of the rock alone.

He had not slept in two days, and it showed only in how still he held himself.

He did not look at me once, and that was what we had agreed.

If he looked at me, it would be a story about a woman.

He wanted it to be a story about a wife.

"I called you here," Torin said, and his voice carried to the trees.

"I am going to show you why, and then I am going to ask you to watch what I do."

"Darling," Briony said, "what is all this?"

"The Luna is welcome to listen."

He held out a hand, and the pack's lawyer came forward with a folder.

The lawyer read from the first page.

"The carrier record for the Alpha's phone," he said.

"At 5:41 on the morning after the lake-house party, that phone sent one text message."

A murmur went through the grass.

"At that hour the Alpha was asleep in the boathouse," the lawyer went on.

"Six guards logged the door shut and the Alpha inside until a quarter past six."

"His phone lay in his jeans on the floor," he said.

"The text was sent from the path above it."

I held very still.

I had read that page myself at the lodge table three days ago, and it still made my stomach turn.

"The text told a girl to keep her mouth shut and take the money," Torin said.

"I never wrote it."

Briony laughed lightly.

"Torin, you could have sent it in your sleep for all anyone knows."

"The text was sent from the path," Torin said, "and there is only one other phone on the pack's plan that was on the boathouse path at 5:41. Yours."

She went on smiling.

"I walked there every morning that spring."

"With the cash."

The lawyer lifted a second page, a photograph of a ledger, with the Elder's seal stamped in red.

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