My Alpha's Betrayal: Burning in the Flames of His Vengeance novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Burial Rule

Tobias refuses to bury Redcliff's dead and says he would do it again; that night Thea saves his life from two assassins.

The guard kitchen at Stonebrook smelled like onions and coffee, and I almost cried in the doorway.

Odessa stood at a stove the size of a car, stirring a pot with a spoon.

"Sit," she said. "You didn't eat, I watched you not eat."

"I'm fine."

She filled it up with chicken and dumplings and dropped it in front of me.

My mother used to make dumplings like that, and the first bite closed my throat.

I ate fast so nobody would see my face.

Odessa sat across from me with her bad leg stretched out.

"Alpha's not an easy man," she said. "He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, and he coughs all night. But he's fair to his own."

"What about people who aren't his own?"

She gave me a long look over the rim of her mug.

"That's the question, isn't it," she said.

At dusk a noise came from the east fence.

I went to see because I was on duty, and Odessa came behind me, limping.

Thirty or forty people stood on the road outside the wire.

They wore the same clothes in the same dirty gray, and some carried babies.

I knew their faces.

Redcliff wolves who had been out of the compound the night of the fire, or had run from the edges.

None of them looked at me, and I turned my face toward the post.

An old man stepped to the wire with his hat in his hands.

"Alpha Kincaid," he called. "We ask the right of burial."

Tobias had come down from the hall with Emmett at his shoulder.

He stopped on the other side of the wire.

"For whom?" he said.

"Thirty-some of ours. They lie where they fell. The crows are at them, Alpha, and the rain's coming."

"They lie where they fell," Tobias said, "because the wolf who loses doesn't get buried by the wolf who wins. That is the old law, and I keep it."

My nails went into the post.

"There are children there," the old man said.

"There were wolves there who killed my father," Tobias said.

"Alpha, those were not the same wolves."

"Redcliff is one pack," Tobias said. "You carried its name, you share its debt."

The old man's face crumpled, and he put his hat back on.

"Then may the Goddess judge you," he said quietly.

"She's welcome to," Tobias said. "I'd do it again."

The refugees turned and went back down the road in the dusk.

I felt Emmett's eyes on me, and I did not know why.

Tobias walked past me up the hill.

He did not look at me, and he coughed into his fist twice before he reached the porch.

Hate came up in me so hot that my vision swam.

I wanted to put my hands around his neck right there in front of two hundred wolves.

And under the hate, my wolf whined for him.

I told myself that was the worst thing about all of it.

I took the floor outside his room at midnight, with my back against the wood.

I heard him through the boards, turning over, coughing, getting up.

At one in the morning I heard a glass break.

Then I heard something else, outside, in the dark below the porch.

Soft feet.

Two of them, not trying hard to be quiet.

They smelled of juniper smoke.

Redcliff.

I should have shouted for Odessa.

I stood up and stood very still at the edge of the porch, listening to them climb.

I thought about the old man at the wire.

It would have been so simple to sit back down.

The first one came over the rail with a knife the length of my forearm.

He went for the door, and I did not decide anything, because my body decided for me.

I hit him in the ribs with my shoulder and the knife skidded across the planks.

The second man was already through.

He drove the blade straight at the door, at the place where a man would sleep, and the door flew open.

Tobias stood there in the doorway bare-chested, half awake, with no weapon.

I threw myself between them.

The blade went across the Alpha's side instead of into it, and I felt it burn along my palm as I caught the man's wrist.

I broke his arm over my knee.

The first man was back on his feet.

Tobias came out of the doorway.

He took the man by the throat and slammed him against the wall so hard that the whole porch shook.

It was over in seconds.

Both of them lay on the planks, groaning.

Tobias turned.

He had a long cut down his ribs, and the blood was running over his belt.

He looked at my hand, then at the broken man at my feet.

"Why did you do that?" he said.

"It's the job," I said.

"Your hand is bleeding too," he said.

"It's a scratch," I said.

The man with the broken arm lifted his head and spat blood on the boards.

"Traitor," he said, and he looked at me with a face I had seen at church every Sunday of my life.

I held my breath.

He did not say my name.

"You could have let him die, you filthy rogue," he said. "Why would you save that animal?"

I looked up at the Alpha of Stonebrook, whose blood was on my hands.

The answer was the one I could not say out loud.

Not yet.

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