He Swore Flowers Would Kill Him, Then Came Home Smelling of Roses novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: I Choose You

Rhett walked out through the gate, and the Redfern elders began to talk all at once.

"Ask my mother who your parents were."

I turned it over once. Maureen had told me they died young, and I had never asked more.

Whatever Rhett knew, I would make his mother say it to my face.

But I did not hear a word the elders said.

I was watching Torin. He stood at the porch rail with his knuckles split, looking down the road after the man he had just hit.

His shoulders were stiff.

"Torin."

"It's all right," he said.

"It isn't. Look at me."

He turned. His face was calm, and the calm was wrong.

"He knelt," Torin said. "He cried. He offered you everything he had." His voice stayed level. "Wolves go back to the ones they were fated to, Clara. I've seen it a hundred times. The bond may be cut, but the pull is not."

"You think I'm going back."

"I think you might. And I think I should say now, in front of my elders, that I will not stop you."

The porch went quiet.

I stared at him.

Three years he had watched me from the far side of a river, and for three years he had told himself I belonged to someone else.

He was still telling himself.

I climbed the porch steps and stood in front of him.

"Hear me," I said, loud enough for every elder at the table. "Hear me, Redfern."

The old men went still.

"I was mated to Rhett Harlan at twenty-one, by a bond I never chose. I'm done with it. I cut it with my own mouth in front of eight hundred wolves."

I took Torin's face in both hands.

"This one I choose," I said. "I choose Torin Brask. Not because a bond says so, or because I'm lonely, or because he was kind to my friend. I choose him because he stood in a hall and let me do the speaking."

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