Claiming The Spare Twin novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: What He Owes

I waited until the door of his rooms closed behind us.

Then I turned on him.

"Not yet," I said. "In front of three hundred people, with the elder standing there holding the words out to you. Not yet?"

"Linnea."

"I have been your Luna for exactly one day, Finlay. Is that already too long?"

"It isn't that."

"Then what is it?"

He stood in the middle of the room with his bandaged hands hanging at his sides.

For once he looked cornered, stripped of all defenses.

"I can't say it to them yet," he said. "Not until I've said something to you."

"Then say it."

He took a breath.

"For ten years, you were in that kitchen," he said. "And I never asked why."

I stayed very still.

"I ate your food at the high table every night. I knew it was yours, because I knew how you cut an onion, and I knew it from the taste of the soup. I sat at that table and I ate it, and I let the pack tell me you were defective, and I never once said, why is she there?"

"You were twenty-five when your father died," I said. "You had a pack to hold."

"I was a coward."

"You were busy."

"I was a coward," he said again, flat and plain. "I saw you scrubbing the floor in the east passage the week after my father's funeral, and I stepped over the bucket. I told myself you liked it. That it was your choice. That if you wanted to leave it, you'd say."

"I wasn't allowed to say."

"I know that now."

"You could have known it every day."

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