Chapter 28: The Trial

Clara's POV

They tried Maureen Harlan on the pack hall floor at noon.

Every wolf in Cedar Hollow came.

Redfern sent two hundred as witnesses, and they stood along the back wall in their dark jackets.

The scorched beds showed through the window behind the dais.

Nobody had cleared the ash.

I had asked them not to.

Maureen stood in the center of the floor with a guard on either arm.

They had given her a clean grey dress.

She held her chin high in it.

She did not look at me.

The oldest elder read the charges in a voice that carried to the doors.

Poisoning an Alpha's mate with valerian and wolfsbane for twenty-five years.

Poisoning the omegas.

Hiring a woman to spy on a sleeping wolf.

Burning the pack's cure.

Stabbing her own son.

"Do you answer?" the elder asked.

"I answer to no one in this room," Maureen said. "Every choice I made kept this pack alive."

"Kept it alive?"

The voice came from the benches.

It was a thin woman I knew from the line, still wrapped in a blanket.

"My daughter couldn't walk for four years," she said.

"You are all alive, aren't you?" Maureen said.

A growl ran around the hall.

The elder lifted his hand, and it stopped.

They called Sabine.

She came forward from the guards' bench and stood where Maureen had stood.

Her face was bare of powder.

Her red hair was tied back plain.

She told it all.

She named the payments one by one, and the hands that had carried them.

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