My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The March Reckoning
The March Reckoning was held on the second Saturday after the thaw, and I walked into the arbor on my own feet, five months gone, in my father's barn coat.
The coat no longer buttoned over my middle.
I had stopped trying.
The snow had gone off the Knob in the last week of February, and the creek ran brown and loud.
The arbor had been swept, and the fire pit was laid.
Three hundred McCracken wolves sat on the right-hand benches, and forty of mine sat on the left.
I had walked up the Knob with them.
The old man with the cane had given me his arm for the last hundred yards, and I had let him.
On the high bench behind the Teller's table sat three men I did not know, in good wool coats, with their hands on their knees.
They were the Alphas of the three neighbouring packs along the ridge.
The old law called them to hear any Reckoning in which one pack called a debt against another.
Ned stood at the head of the McCracken benches in a clean canvas coat with his hands at his sides.
He had not looked at me once since I came in.
That was my doing.
I had asked him to stand there and not come to me, and he had done it.
He had come to the Laurel Gap house on Sundays and stood at the foot of the porch steps and asked each time whether I needed anything.
I had said no for ten weeks.
I had said yes on a few nights I chose, in the springhouse room, with the door shut.
I had not said what I meant by it yet, and he had not asked.
Hepzibah Presnell sat at the Teller's table with her cloth bag in her lap.
She looked at me as I came down the middle of the arbor, and she nodded once.
"The Reckoning is called," she said. "The first debt is Verna Lowry's."
A murmur went along the benches.
Verna sat on the left in her good grey dress with Dell's place empty beside her.
She had come in on the arm of her lawyer.
She had her hand on her cross.
She did not look afraid.
She looked as she always looked in church.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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