Chapter 16: The Foot of the Grave

Conall's POV

The Beta stood in the doorway of the Fir Cone, and I put myself between him and her.

I did not touch him.

I only stood there, and the whole diner watched my shoulders.

"A recording," the Beta said, "made by a jealous young man who talks like his mother's kitchen."

"It's his voice and your wife's," Cassandra said behind me. "And it names you."

"Is it? A waitress with a grudge brought it to you at dawn."

"The council will want to ask where it was kept."

He smiled around the room, and a few heads nodded, because he had been smiling at them for thirty years.

"Alpha," he said. "I'll see you at the Hall."

He turned and went out, and the bell rang after him.

Braden had not moved from the middle of the floor.

When the diner started to talk again, he came past me on his way to the door and said it low.

"She kissed you in front of forty people, Alpha, and she looked at me while she did it."

"Ask yourself who it was for."

I let him go.

I should have broken his arm, and I did not, and the words went in anyway.

I did not tell Cassandra.

I walked the ridge road until the light went flat, and I found myself at the cemetery gate.

I had not been inside it in five years.

The grave was easy to find.

Two stones side by side, with a pot of dead mums gone brown on the left one.

I stood at the foot of it with my hands open and said what I had meant to say that day.

"I'm Conall Kincaid. I was Alpha when your daughter needed one, and I didn't walk up."

"I'm sorry."

The wind moved the mums.

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