Wrong Girl, Right Alpha novel · Chapter 20 of 48

Chapter 20: What He Would Burn

Ronan's POV

I went down to the cellar alone, and I took a lamp and left my knife upstairs.

I knew myself well enough to leave it.

The steps were old and steep, and I counted them as I went down.

There were fourteen.

Nora's mother had died at the bottom of them, and I had walked past the door for thirteen years.

Celia sat on a flour barrel at the far wall with her cardigan buttoned to the neck.

They had given her a blanket, and she hadn't touched it.

"Ronan," she said. "Have you come to do it yourself?"

"I came to look at you."

"Your father would have done it."

"He thought about it every day for a year."

"Then he looked at my little boy asleep in my lap and couldn't."

"I'm not my father."

"No," Celia said. "You're worse. You love someone."

I set the lamp on a shelf.

My hands were not quite steady, and I flattened them against my thighs until they were.

"Here is what you can have," she said, very reasonably.

"Say I was ill. Say grief turned my mind. Send me south to my sister's house."

"And I will tell you where the Blackwater Alpha is waiting for his men."

"I don't need you for that. Dane already told me."

Her face flickered.

"Dane would never."

"He told me in the truck yesterday, with both hands on the wheel."

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