He Brought His Lover Home, So I Left Him to His Regret novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Father's Hands

A birth family she barely remembers waits in the castle. Kendrick walks in to give his border report and learns whose wall he guarded.

The east parlor had a fire going and nobody sitting near it.

A broad man in a grey coat stood at the window with his hands behind his back. A woman in a green shawl stood beside him and watched the door.

I had seen both of them once, on a screen, in the spring. I had talked to them for forty minutes and then thrown up in a bathroom.

They looked older in person. They looked like me.

"Rowena," the woman said.

She crossed the carpet and stopped short of touching me.

"Can I see you?" she whispered.

I nodded, and she put her hand under my chin and turned my face to the light.

Her thumb found the small white scar there.

"You fell off the porch rail at four," she said. Her voice cracked on the last word. "You wouldn't let anyone put a bandage on it. You said wolves don't need them."

I hadn't remembered that. I had no memory of it at all.

But my eyes were wet before I knew why.

"I didn't know if you'd come," the man said from the window. His voice was low and rough. "I told your mother you would. I've told her for sixteen years."

"Ronan," she said. "Let the girl breathe."

"I'm breathing," he said, and he was not.

He crossed the room and put both arms around me.

He smelled of pine smoke and cold iron, and it went straight through me.

I had never been held like that.

I'd been hugged before. Lenore hugged me every Christmas.

This was something else.

This was somebody holding on because they'd been told to let go and hadn't.

"I'm sorry," I said into his coat. "I'm so sorry I'm late."

"You are not late," he said. "You are exactly where we left the light on."

My birth mother laughed and cried at the same time. She was holding something she had brought in her bag.

It was a stuffed grey wolf, missing one ear.

"Your father sewed the other one on four times," she said. "It kept coming off. You chewed it."

I took it in both hands. It smelled of cedar and of a house I couldn't picture.

For a few minutes nobody said anything, and it was the best silence I had ever been in.

Then the door opened.

"Your Majesty's steward asked me to report on the northern wall," a voice said.

"He said an Alpha from the border was asking for the officer who held it."

Kendrick stopped in the doorway.

He saw the fire. He saw the stuffed wolf. He saw a big man's arm around his wife's shoulders.

"Commander Winslow," my father said. He did not let go of me. "Good. I asked for you."

"Alpha Ashdown." Kendrick's eyes moved from him to me and back. "Sir. I didn't know you'd come south."

"I came for my daughter."

Kendrick did not seem to hear it.

"Three years you held the northern wall for me," my father went on. "Never lost a patrol."

"I read every one of your reports. I'd have shaken your hand in the autumn, but you never came up the hill."

"I was relieved to be at the post, sir."

"I know why you were." My father's gaze was flat and unhurried. "Commander, this is Rowena Ashdown."

The room waited.

"My wife," Kendrick said, and then stopped, because he heard how it sounded.

"Yes," I said. "Registered. Three years. The Council hears the termination on the twenty-eighth."

He stared at me.

He had never once asked me who I had been before his parents took me in.

In sixteen years he hadn't wondered.

I was a girl who ate at his table and cleaned up after his parties, and somehow everything was my fault.

"You never told me," he said.

"You never asked. You never asked anything."

His mouth tightened. "Do you have any idea what I've been doing at that wall? I thought I was serving a border pack. I didn't know it was..."

He looked at my father, and something shifted in his face.

"The Ashdown line," he said slowly. "No other children. Sir, the northern seat has no heir."

"It has an heir." My father's hand tightened on my shoulder.

"The seat passes to my daughter, and to whoever she takes as mate."

"That's the law of my pack, and it has been for two hundred years."

He let that sit.

"So I'd be careful with how you talk to her, Commander," he said. "Whoever she mates will hold half the northern pass."

Kendrick's face went white, and then it went something else.

I knew that look. I had seen it every time he thought I'd done something clever.

"Oh," he said quietly. "Of course."

"No," I said.

"The clerk told me what my mother filed. You two knew about the seat all along."

His voice went hard and cold.

"You went north and found your father, and now you want out, because now you can do better."

"I found my father in the spring. I didn't know about the seat until this minute."

"Right," Kendrick said.

He turned and walked out.

My birth mother looked at me, stricken.

"It's all right," I said, and it was a lie.

I had just watched him decide again that I was a schemer.

And behind it I had seen something I didn't understand yet.

For one second, when he said "my mother," he had frowned and looked unsure.

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