Too Late, Alpha: I Died Carrying Your Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Man on the Porch

Garrick comes to Northfork's porch with divers and the Holmberg pack while Marit hides in the pantry; Lars lies to his face, and Garrick leaves saying she would have let his heir go too.

Garrick came to Lars's porch at noon, with a dozen of his wolves and two men carrying diving gear.

I knew it before I saw him, because Lars went to the door and said, without turning, "Pantry. Now."

The pantry was a narrow closet off the kitchen, with a door that didn't quite meet its frame.

I shut myself in among the flour sacks and canned beans and put my eye to the gap.

Lars opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

He pulled it almost closed behind him, but I could still see the whole yard.

Garrick stood at the foot of the steps in his black coat.

He looked ten years older than he had the night before.

His eyes were red, and his hands were hanging open at his sides.

Dag Arneson, his enforcer, stood half a step behind him, with his head down.

"You're on my shore, Holmberg," Lars said.

"My mate went into that water at midnight." Garrick's voice cracked on it. "The current runs under the ice toward the north side. I have the right to search."

"You have the right to ask."

"I'm asking."

Lars looked at the divers, and then at the dozen wolves behind them.

"Nothing came out of the lake on my side," he said. "Not last night, not this morning."

It was a flat, easy lie.

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing, and then I wanted to cry.

Garrick put his hand flat on his chest.

"I felt it tear," he said.

"Felt what?"

"The bond." He swallowed. "It doesn't snap on its own. One side has to bite it through. It went in the water, and I felt her do it."

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Behind Garrick, Dag shifted his weight and lifted his head.

His nose flared, and he looked past Lars, at the cabin door, and straight at the gap where I was standing.

I stopped breathing.

Dag looked at the door for a long time.

Then he lowered his eyes again.

"Alpha, there's nothing here," he said in a low voice. "Let him be."

I didn't understand it, and I filed it away to think about later.

"Maybe she wanted out," Lars said.

Garrick lunged up the first step.

Two of Lars's wolves came out of the trees at the side of the yard, big and quiet, with their hackles up, and stopped him with their bodies.

"Careful," Lars said, and he didn't raise his voice.

Garrick stood there breathing hard.

"You think I don't know that?" he said, and his voice dropped, and it was worse than shouting.

"She spent three years not saying one word about that winter. I waited. I told myself she was hurt, she was little, she'd tell me when she was ready."

He wiped his face with his sleeve.

"And then Linnea came home and told me what she saw, and Marit stood on my ice and looked me in the eye and said she didn't remember."

"Maybe she didn't."

"Nobody forgets that."

"A ten-year-old might."

"You weren't there."

"Neither were you," Lars said.

That landed.

I watched Garrick's whole face change.

"You were thirteen," Lars said. "You were at home. Somebody told you what happened and you've believed it for eighteen years."

"Linnea was standing right there."

"And you broke your wife's hand on her word."

"I wasn't going to let her walk out of that lake and say nothing," Garrick said, and his voice broke apart.

"I wanted her to say it. I only wanted her to say it."

He looked at the water, and the black hole, and the men with their ropes.

When he turned back to the porch he had put his face together again.

"Dive the shoreline," he told his men. "Stay off his land."

Then he looked at Lars for a long moment.

"If she washes up on your side, you send her to me."

"I will."

Garrick went down the steps, and stopped at the bottom.

"I'd have gone in after her," he said, quietly, to nobody.

"You carried the other one," Lars said.

Garrick flinched.

He took three steps, and then he said, without turning around, the last thing I heard from him that day.

"She'd have let my heir go too."

In the pantry I put both hands over my belly.

The pup kicked me, once, hard.

I did not remember Eli at all.

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