The Apex They Could Never Own: A Werewolf Romance of Power, Possession, and Fate novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Old Chain

Ansel's POV

I left her asleep, because I knew she would stop me.

She would not have needed the Voice to do it.

One word of the Order from her mouth, and my body would have turned around on the ridge road and walked back to the bunkhouse.

I had thought about that all evening, with her hand on my chest.

Every holder of the black cuff before her had used the leash within a day.

She had used it twice in six days, and the second time she hated how fast I obeyed.

I did not know whether she would use it a third time, with Hattie in a chair at Highgate and the dawn closing in.

I did not want to find out.

So I took off the borrowed flannel and folded it, and I ran.

It is twelve miles from the Brough ridge to Highgate's east gate.

I made them in under an hour, in the dark, in the cold, in my wolf's skin, and I shifted back at the treeline.

Lucas was waiting on the gate steps with six wolves and a lantern.

Hattie sat in a kitchen chair at his feet with her wrists tied and her hair hacked off to the jaw.

When she saw me, she shut her eyes.

"No," she said. "You absolute idiot. No."

"Hello, Hattie."

"Where is she?" Lucas said, and looked past me at the trees. "I told you to bring her."

"I came instead."

He stared at me, and then he began to smile.

"Father will be so pleased," he said.

"Let her walk to the road first," I said. "Alone. Then I come in. Or I go back into the trees and you explain to your father why you lost both of us."

He could not Order me, and he knew it.

He looked at his six wolves, and at the lantern, and at Hattie.

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