Chapter 9: What Jasper Was Told

Jasper's POV

My father sent for me at one in the morning, and I went, because I had not been sleeping anyway.

His study smelled of tea and old paper.

He sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves with a single lamp lit.

"Sit down, Jasper."

"I'll stand."

"As you like." He turned his cup on the saucer. "I heard what you said at the Feast."

"I said it to a drunk."

"You said it to three hundred wolves." He did not raise his voice. "You called her your mate."

"A slip."

"Is it?"

I did not answer.

My father looked at the lamp.

"I was twenty-eight when I met your mother," he said. "The Moon put her in my arms at a harvest dance. I was a happy fool for twelve years."

I knew the story.

Everyone in Ironwood knew it.

"Do you know what a mate bond is, when one of you is dying?" he said. "The healers wouldn't tell you. You were a child."

"No."

"It means her pain is yours." He said it quietly.

"She was sick for eleven months, and I felt every hour of it. Every cough. Every night she couldn't breathe."

"When she went, I was in the room, and I went with her for six weeks. You found me on the floor."

I remembered.

I was twelve years old, and my father had been lying on the study floor with his eyes open.

"I was Alpha, and I could not stand," he said.