They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Twelve Names

Zosia's POV

The March thaw turned the cemetery road to black soup.

I dug my father's grave on the fourth of the month, a week early, because the ground would not stay soft.

It was a plain shale cut, six feet down, on the Gamma row beside my mother's.

I did it in forty minutes.

I did not cry.

I climbed out and stood looking down into it, with my arms hanging and the shovel across my boots.

It was the first grave I had ever dug for someone I loved who was still breathing.

My father had asked me to.

"I want to see it before I go," he had said.

"I want to know it's done right."

He lay in the front room with the quilt up to his chin, and he told me he wanted to hear the sentence.

"What sentence?"

"The one you say at the burying," he said.

"The Gamma's sentence.

"I haven't taught it to you."

I stared at him.

I had learned every word of every burying rite there was by the time I was fifteen.

I had read the names of two hundred wolves over two hundred graves.

"There's nothing after the name," I said.

"You read the name, and you say rest, and you lay the first shovelful."

"That's for the pack's dead," my father said.

"There's a different one for the Gamma's."

He reached under the pillow with a shaking hand and drew out a folded sheet of ruled paper, soft as cloth.

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