They All Forgot Me, So the Lycan King Marched for Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Stray in the House

Her mother feeds her like a guest while her brothers tease her; Ellis's hand knows her braid; the King demands a parley at dawn.

Every head at the fence turned to me, and I wanted the ground to open up.

Mom's arm tightened around my shoulders.

Dad stepped sideways until his big body was between me and the gate.

"She's a guest of Ironwood," he said. "She's under my roof, and nobody takes a guest from my roof."

He didn't know my name, and he was protecting me anyway.

That made it harder to breathe than anything else that morning.

"Then I'll wait outside your roof, Alpha," the King said. "Until you tell me why she is crying."

I touched my face, and my fingers came away wet.

"We'll talk at dawn," Dad said. "On the road, in front of both our people. Not before."

The King looked at me one more time.

Then he nodded, and the black-coated wolves turned and walked back to their trucks in rows.

Mom walked me home with her arm around me the whole way.

"It's all right, sweetheart," she kept saying. "It's all right, nobody's taking you anywhere."

She sat me at the kitchen table and put a bowl of chicken soup in front of me.

It was Mom's soup, with the lemon and the little star noodles she buys by the case.

I ate it because it was hers.

"I'm Trudy," she said, sitting down across from me. "Trudy Kinross. What's your name?"

"Wynn," I said.

"That's pretty," she said, and frowned a little, searching for the word.

I watched her do it.

She lifted her hand toward my braid, and let it drop.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I keep thinking I should know that name."

"It's okay," I said, though it wasn't.

My brothers came in loud and hungry, the way they always did.

The twins were first, shoving each other through the door.

"Mom, is this the girl everyone's talking about?" one of them said. "The one the King wants?"

"Be nice," Mom said.

"I'm always nice," the other twin said, and dropped into the chair next to mine.

He stuck out his hand. "I'm a Kinross. Ask anyone. I'm the handsome one."

"You're the loud one," the first twin said.

"Same thing."

I laughed, and it came out wet and strange.

It was the oldest argument in my family, and they were having it in front of me as if I were company.

The middle two came in next and took chairs across the table.

The baby slid in behind them, eighteen years old and still growing, and ate half my crackers before Mom smacked his hand.

Nobody said my name, because nobody knew it.

Then Ellis came in, last of all.

He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed and looked at me for a long time.

"What did the King say about you?" he asked. "Honestly. Did he say why?"

"He said he heard me in his head," I said.

"That's not possible," Ellis said. "Only pack wolves link with pack wolves."

"I know," I said.

He walked around the table to refill his coffee, and his hand moved to my braid.

He tugged it, once, lightly, the way he'd tugged it every morning of my life.

Then he stopped with his fingers still on it and stared at his own hand.

"Sorry," he said, and let go fast. "That was weird. I don't know why I did that."

"It's fine," I said.

My voice cracked on the second word.

Ellis went red to the ears and stood there, holding his coffee and patting his pockets for nothing.

That was when I knew.

The part of them that loved me was still in there.

It just had no name to hang on.

Mom put me in the guest room at the end of the hall, with clean sheets and a folded blanket.

I knew every board of that hallway by heart, and I knew my own door was the third on the left, with the sticker on it that said NO BROTHERS.

She walked right past it.

I stood in the guest room doorway until she was gone, and then I went and looked at my own door.

The sticker was still there.

I put my forehead against it, and for a minute I let myself cry the way I wanted to.

A while later, boots hit the porch hard.

Ellis burst in without knocking, out of breath from running from the fence.

"Dad's called everyone to the kitchen," he said. "The King just sent a runner."

We all crowded into the kitchen again, Dad at the head of the table with Lester at his right.

Dad held a folded paper in his hand and did not look at me.

"The King will take the dawn parley," he said. "He has one condition, and he put it in writing."

He unfolded the paper.

"He says his army stays at our fence until he has the girl with the gray eyes," Dad read. "He says it will stay a year if it has to."

Everybody looked at me.

I felt Lester's eyes on me longest of all, and his hand rested on Dad's shoulder, kind and heavy.

"Glenn," he said gently, "maybe the girl should answer a few questions of her own."

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