The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 15 of 40

Chapter 15: The Gallery

His fingers dug into my arm.

Three years ago I would have gone limp and waited for it to be over.

I'd spent a summer lifting hundredweight sacks.

I turned my arm against his thumb, the way you twist a sack off a hook, and his grip broke.

He looked at his own hand like it had betrayed him.

"Don't touch me again," I said.

"You're in my house."

"I'm in a hallway. I'm going to bed."

He put his palm flat on the wall beside my head.

"You think I don't know what you're doing? You and my brother, playing house in that ruin. Grinding your little flour. Stealing my river."

"Nobody stole your river. They just stopped drowning in it."

"The Debt still stands," he said. "It's written. A pup of his on you is mine in law."

"The Debt ended at Midsummer, on a cake knife."

"The law is what the king reads it to be."

He leaned closer.

"Whatever you two make up there, in the dark, I'll have it. Do you understand me? I'll have it carried down here in a basket."

I didn't answer.

I was thinking of a dark room after a boar hunt, and an old man's shaking hand.

I wanted to say it.

I wanted to say it so badly my teeth hurt.

"Let her go, Osric."

Corvin stood at the end of the gallery.

He must have walked the whole length of it without a sound.

He was still in his good black coat, and his face was perfectly calm.

Osric didn't step back. He turned his head.

"Little brother. Come to collect?"

"Come to walk her to her door."

Corvin came down the gallery between the old kings.

He stopped an arm's length away.

He didn't look at me. He looked at his brother.

Osric smiled.

"Four months," he said. "Four months she's been under your roof. And still nothing. Still sleeping in the barracks, I hear, like a stable boy."

"You hear a lot."

"I hear you won't touch her." Osric laughed. "Is it her? Or is it you? Can't a Ravenscar even manage that much?"

Corvin's face didn't move.

Mine did. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood.

"Do your duty," Osric said. "Get her with a pup, and I'll give you back Frostgate. I'll give you anything you want. A seat on my council. Your old rooms. Our mother's good opinion."

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