My Alpha Shamed Me at His Victory Feast, So I Took His Coast novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: I Set

Armand's POV

My sixty drivers followed us back down the river and across the Jonesport bridge.

That night they stood on the Beal wharf in the dark.

I had not asked them to come.

That morning at the gorge I had watched a woman in a wolf's skin put her teeth to a man's throat and let go.

I had thought: whatever I owe her, I owe it in front of people.

So at nine o'clock on Sunday night I stood on her father's planks, under one bare bulb, with my father's cant hook in my hand.

The fleet had come down to the rail.

Forty captains stood with their wives in the cold, and the old man in the co-op cap stood at the front with his arms folded.

Verna sat at her card table, with the black ledger open under a lantern.

Mercy stood at the end of the wharf with her arm in a sling of Verna's flannel.

Her father's buoy hung on the rail behind her.

She did not look at me.

I set the cant hook on the card table beside the ledger.

"Counter," I said. "I am Armand Michaud, of the Machias drivers."

"I know who you are," said Verna. "You're the man who lifted the children's table."

Somebody in the dark laughed, and I kept my face still.

"On the river we have one rule," I said, loud enough for the wharf. "Nobody is left behind."

"A man goes into the water, we go in after him."

I let that sit.

"A man goes down in the jam, we cut the logs off him with our own hands."

"The Hall had a rule too," I said. "The Bay calls, the Hall answers by the next dawn."

The captains murmured.

"It did not answer. A year ago this month, it did not answer, and two men died on the ice."

I looked down the wharf at her.

"The drivers answer the Bay," I said. "When the Bay calls, we come. By the next dawn. By any road. Whatever it costs us."

"Write it, Counter."

Verna wrote.

I turned to my sixty, standing along the rail in their canvas coats with their caps in their fists.

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