My Alpha's Betrayal: Burning in the Flames of His Vengeance novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: First Board
Tobias lifted the first board on the lower row with his stitches still in.
He had walked out of the clinic against orders at dawn, with a hand pressed to his chest, and half of Stonebrook came behind him in a silent line.
I walked at the back with Bryn.
The ash had been raked into rows over the last week, black and gray along the creek, and the wind that came up the lane smelled of wet char and a little of spring.
The east row waited at the end.
He stopped at the third lot from the creek.
A pile of new lumber lay there, pale and sweet-smelling, cut at the Stonebrook mill from his own trees.
He took the top board and set it on his shoulder.
The wound pulled, and I saw his face go white.
"Let someone help," Odessa called.
"No."
"Tobias."
"The Moot said by my own hands."
He carried it twenty feet across the ash, and he set it down on the stone footing where the green door's step had been.
He knelt and drove the first nail.
It took him six blows.
When it was in, he sat back on his heels, breathing hard, and looked at it.
One board, one nail, on a lot that held nothing else.
Then someone behind me laughed and said, "Well, it's a start."
It was the Stonebrook woman who had cut the children's names.
She walked past me with a hammer in her fist and a belt of nails around her waist.
"Move over, Alpha," she said. "That's crooked."
He moved over.
After that, I couldn't count them.
Two hundred wolves went down the lanes with saws and hammers and wheelbarrows, and the forty from Redcliff came to meet them.
For an hour I stood and watched people who had fought each other across a gravel road drive nails into the same frame.
The old man held a level.
The tall young warrior hauled lumber on his back.
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