Rejected for Being Barren, Now the Alphas Kneel novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Thirty Days

Rhea's POV

I shut the door of his room and put my back against it.

The children were asleep in the far room under the Healer's eye, and two Ashfall wolves sat outside it with their swords across their knees.

Nobody was going to knock for a while.

Lucan stood in the middle of the floor with his hands open at his sides.

He had bark dirt from the tree still black in the cracks of his knuckles.

I took a basin from the stand and a cloth, and I sat him on the edge of the bed.

"You didn't wash," I said.

"I forgot."

"You've carried that tree on your hands all night."

I took one hand in mine and began to clean it, finger by finger.

The water went grey.

He watched my face and not my hands.

"Tell me something I don't know," I said. "It doesn't have to be big."

He was quiet.

"Every spring," he said, "when I rode the northern borders, I went up to the lodge on the thirtieth day of the month you left and stood on the step at dusk."

"Why?"

"To count to thirty. Out loud. Then I stayed one more night, so I would never again be a day late to you."

I stopped washing.

The cloth dripped on my knee.

"For ten years," I said.

"Yes."

"You stood in the snow and counted to thirty alone."

"It was worse in summer," he said. "The flies."

I laughed.

It cracked halfway and turned into something else, and I put the cloth down and pressed the back of my wrist against my eyes.

"I remembered too," I said. "Thirty nights on that step, and then every year on the same night, in the hollow house with six children asleep around me."

"Rhea."

"We remembered the same days."

"We did."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

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