The Alpha King's Heart novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What He Pressed

Mom told me in the corridor, with the lamps hissing over us and a guard standing nearby pretending not to hear.

"Your father set the charge at Stonegate Hall," she said.

"No."

"Macy."

"He fixed pipes for the quarry. He taught me to fish."

"He was a blaster, and the best in three counties."

I pulled my wrist out of her hand.

"You're telling me he blew up a building full of people."

"I'm telling you what he told me the night before." Her voice was thin. "The delegates were afraid the parley was a trap. They asked him to wire the cellar pillars as a last resort."

"A last resort."

"If the doors were locked, he would bring it down."

I could hear my own pulse.

"And were they locked?"

"I don't know," Mom said. "I wasn't there. He came home at midnight with his hands black and shaking, and he never said what he saw."

"So you don't know."

"I know he pressed it."

She said it plainly.

It was the plainest thing I had ever heard her say.

"Forty-one people," I said.

"Yes."

"Strake's brother."

"Yes."

"The King's mother."

"Yes."

I looked at the woman who had sewn my school dresses and held my face over a basin the night of my first flogging.

I did not know her.

"You let me walk into his house," I said. "You watched him give me his coat."

"I watched him put his crest on my daughter, and I knew whose son he was," Mom said. "I couldn't speak. I couldn't move."

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