I Will Never Be Yours novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: Blood Right
They brought Alder into the yard at first light.
Four guards held his chains, and he walked on his own, limping on the bandaged thigh.
The Ironcrest pack stood in a half circle with the sun coming up behind them.
Nobody spoke.
I stood in front of them with the foreman at my right shoulder and Caspian at the edge of the yard, hands behind his back.
The foreman put something in my hand.
It was a quarry knife, heavy and plain, with a hilt wrapped in old leather.
"Your father's," he said. "I took it off the floor that night, before the roof came down."
I closed my fingers around it.
It still fit the groove his hand had worn.
Alder looked at the knife and then at me, and the soft sad look came over his face.
"Sorcha," he said. "Let's not do this in front of children."
"They're not children."
"Some of them are."
"They were children three years ago," I said. "They watched you."
His eyes slid along the line.
For the first time I saw him flinch.
A girl in the third row, not more than fifteen, had her fists clenched.
"I didn't enjoy it," Alder said, to all of them. "I want that known. Alaric was a good man. He was only in the way."
"In the way of what?" the foreman said.
"Of Cas." He turned toward the King, and his voice rose. "I put you on that throne, Cas. I held your hand when your father went in the ground. Every day for twenty-four years, I made sure you never had to look at what it cost."
"You killed my guards," Caspian said. "Twenty-six of them."
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