He Staged My Funeral, Now His Wolf Howls at My Door novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Truth

I gave him two days to eat and sleep, and then I sat down on the stool and asked for the real reason.

He was propped against the wall of the back room with a bowl of the old woman's broth.

The color had come back to his face.

"Which part?" he said.

"All of it. Why you lied to me for three years, and why you let me wear cuffs you didn't even mean."

"I meant them."

"Don't."

He put the bowl on the floor.

"Six years ago," he said, "my beast started coming apart."

I kept my face still. This was the part I needed to hear in his own voice.

"It began the winter Lydia was taken. I was told she was alive in a cell across the border. That night my wolf went for my own father's throat in front of the packhouse."

"He survived?"

"He lived. He died of something else the next year. My beast never came back the way it was."

He turned his hands over and looked at the palms.

"Doctors found nothing. Elders said grief. Every full moon it got worse. By the third year I was chaining myself in the vault, and by the fourth I couldn't make the chain hold."

"And then the bond snapped on me."

"On the first night, you were on the sofa in my war room with your shoes off, arguing with my elder about a dosage. My beast went quiet."

He almost smiled, and it hurt to watch.

"Quiet like I had never heard it. I thought I was dying."

I thought of the Alpha who had stood in that doorway at twenty-six, with his coat dripping, looking at me hard, and I had no idea why.

I had thought it was hate.

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