My Alpha Shamed Me at His Victory Feast, So I Took His Coast novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Eben's Tooth

I walked him into the ice house with the tooth shut in my fist, and I dropped the bar across the door.

The Hall's flatbeds were still grinding up the island road.

The ice house stood at the end of the wharf, a windowless plank shed where the old co-op used to pack ice in sawdust.

Nobody had cut ice on the Bay in forty years.

The sawdust was still there, a foot deep in the corners, and it smelled of spruce and cold.

Gray light came through the gaps between the boards in thin lines.

Armand stood in the middle of the floor with his hands open at his sides.

"Show me," he said.

I opened my fist.

The tooth lay across the rope scar on my palm, yellow-white, snapped at the root, with its notch in the edge.

He looked at it, and the color left his face from the forehead down until his beard stood black against it.

"That's Eben's," he said.

"That's Eben's," I said.

"It was in the hide."

"It was sewn into the throat of the hide, under the fold, where nobody would look."

My voice cracked, and I let it.

"My brother put it there. Eben killed that Alpha, Armand. Not Josiah. Eben went for his throat, and he left his tooth in it."

Armand sat down hard on an upturned crate.

"Josiah said he took it on the ice," he said slowly. "He said the Beals held the bank."

"They held the bank, and my brother killed him, and then he lay down and died beside my father."

"And Josiah skinned the body and wore it home."

I closed my hand over the tooth again.

"You came down that bank at gray dawn. You saw them lying there."

"I saw them," he said.

"You saw Eben's mouth open and a tooth gone."

"Yes," he said.

"You carried them home on poles, and you never once came to tell me what you saw."

He lifted his eyes to mine.

They were wet, and he did not look away.

"I didn't know what I was looking at," he said.

"A year and a day, Armand. You knew where I lived."

"You stood at my father's funeral and said you were sorry for my loss, and then you went home."

"Yes," he said.

"Do you know what I did that year?"

"No," he said.

"I ate at the foot of a table under that hide. I said grace under it."

He shut his eyes.

"I read the Hall's account into the Book at Machias," he said, very low. "With my hand on the page. I read it twice."

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