The Alphas Broken Mate novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Dunraven

Caius's POV

They had buried my father outside the walls, in ground the Council had marked with a rope and no stone.

I had come every year to the place and never knelt.

I knelt now.

It was the third morning after the valley.

The whole of Blood Moon stood on the hillside behind me in black cloaks, four hundred of them.

The scarred warrior had asked to carry the coffin.

He had been a boy of nineteen in my father's guard on the day of the hanging.

He had never said a word about it to me in eighteen years.

Six men lifted the old Alpha's bones from the unmarked earth and laid them in oak.

Bryony had washed the bones herself and wrapped them in clean linen.

"He weighs less than I thought," she said, as she handed over the last of him.

"Nobody keeps their weight in a ditch," said the scarred man, and his voice broke.

I took the coffin lid and set it in place with my own hands.

The bearers carried him up the hill through the gate, and the pack opened a lane.

Then they began to hammer their chests.

It started with one man at the front, and then a hundred, and then it rolled up the slope.

*Dunraven,* they said, with every blow. *Dunraven. Dunraven.*

My father's name rang off the fortress walls until the stones shook.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alphas Broken Mate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.