The Body-Swapped Heiress Returns as the Alpha's Mate novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Trial at the Stone
The Redfern lodge was full by noon.
Both packs had come.
The Crowe wolves stood along the north wall, and the Redfern families sat on the benches under the antler beams, and nobody spoke.
I stood beside the founder's stone with my father's coat on my shoulders.
Mathias stood next to me in a clean shirt, with his side bound, and he would not sit.
Jasper was brought in last.
His wrist was in a splint, and two Redfern men held his arms.
He looked at the benches with the same easy face he had worn at the head of my father's table for seven years.
The eldest struck his stick on the boards.
"Jasper Redfern," he said. "You are charged with putting a false heir on the altar, with selling a witch the Redfern ridge, and with taking a woman from her sickbed to cut a wolf out of your sister. How do you answer?"
"I did what the pack needed," Jasper said.
"Tell it plainly."
He looked at me, then.
It was the look he used to give me when I was nine and had asked a question he did not want to answer.
"Our father was dying," he said. "He told me one thing at the end. He said a Crowe pup was going to be Valerie's mate, and the bond would carry the Redfern land across the river."
A rustle went down the benches.
"I was seventeen, and I stood at the foot of the bed, and I thought: not while I'm alive."
"You were twenty," I said.
"I was twenty." He did not smile. "I put the bracelet on you the year after. I closed the north road. I picked Darren because he was weak and he'd never fight me for you."
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