Chapter 15: What He Was Afraid Of

Lachlan watched her walk toward the gate with a blanket around her shoulders, and every step she took away from him dragged at his ribs.

He did not follow her. She had not told him he could.

"She's going alone?" Junie's mother said. "Alpha, that's my daughter."

"I know whose daughter it is."

"Then do something."

"I am doing it," he said.

He turned to the pack, who were still half on their knees and staring at him.

"Search parties of four. Every road, every hunting blind, the old mill, the river. Anyone who finds a trace of Junie howls twice."

They scattered.

He stood in the empty clearing with the pages in his hand, and for the first time in three days nobody was watching him.

Hester came and stood beside him.

She was shaking. She had held a forty-year silence and it had cost her everything she had.

"Ask me," she said.

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever you've been carrying since the minute you saw that name. I can see it on you."

He had not meant to say it. It came out anyway.

"In January, Orson told me something at my father's grave."

"Tell me."

"He said a wolfless mate dies within a year. That the bond takes root, the wolf never comes to answer it, and the mate wastes and dies."

"He said I'd watched my father go and I should not choose to watch it twice."

"And he said the Moon would give me one soon."

Hester shut her eyes.

"That is not true," she said. "It has never been true. There's no wolfless mate who died of anything but old age."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alpha Rejected Her at Midnight, Then the Land Chose Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.