Chapter 13: The Mother With the Truck

The uncle's truck left at one in the morning, and nobody on the ranch slept.

At four, headlights came up the road with no engine noise behind them.

Every ranch hand in the kitchen reached for a coat.

A battered pickup rolled to the gate and stopped.

The woman who got out was the mother from the pups' table.

Her boy was the one I had pulled back from the floor of the hall.

She had her hood up and her hands open, held away from her sides.

"Don't shoot," she said. "It's only me, and I brought something that isn't mine."

She opened the back door of the cab.

Greta sat on the floor of it with her knees up, wrapped in a man's coat.

She held the grey blanket against her chest.

The fox stitched in its edge was out in the open, and she didn't turn it in.

"I watched the cabin for three nights," the mother said.

"I saw your truck go. Ten minutes later I saw his truck turn onto the road."

"She was out the back window with the baby before he reached the porch."

Greta lifted her head.

Her lip was split where she had bitten it, and her grey eyes were rimmed red.

"I didn't know where else," she said. "I couldn't go to Bram."

"No," I said.

"If I go to the pack, the uncle gets me. If I go to Bram, he gets the baby."

"Come in."

Cade had come up behind me without a sound.

"Hospitality law," he said. "Nobody takes anyone out of my yard without my say."

Greta looked at him, and then at me, and she started to cry.

I had never seen her cry when she wasn't being watched.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Stole My Title, So I Took His True Heir from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.