Thirty Days Before My Alpha Lost Me Forever novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Coat

Garrick waits alone on the border stones to hand Tilda her coat and bag, tells her he is not her father and that he cannot say why, and her coat pocket holds a form signed halfway.

The border stones stood a quarter mile up the ridge road, three grey slabs in a row with moss on their north faces.

Dorian walked me there with his six men and Odette behind us, and a pack of Iron Hollow wolves followed at a polite distance.

Nobody told me to stay in the yard.

Nobody would have been able to make me.

Garrick sat on the middle stone with a canvas duffel at his feet and my winter coat folded over one knee.

He had shifted back before we arrived, and he had dressed.

His boots were on the Blood Moon side of the stones.

His hands were open on his thighs where all of us could see them.

"Alpha Lindholm," Dorian said, and stopped ten feet away. "You're sitting on my border."

"I'm sitting on the line." Garrick's voice was low and rough. "I haven't crossed it. I'll stay on this side."

"That's generous."

"It's the law."

His eyes were on me before the words were out.

They went over my face, my hands and my shoes, one after the other, and he didn't blink.

He looked tired in a way I had not seen in eight years.

There was a strip of white tape across the knuckles of his right hand, and a smear of dried blood at the edge.

"What did you do to your hand?" I asked.

"A wall."

"Which wall?"

"The gatehouse."

"Why?"

He didn't answer, and I felt my temper rise.

"You came all the way up here to say nothing?"

"I came to bring you this."

He held up the coat.

It was my good wool coat, the grey one, and the duffel at his feet was the same bag I had used every summer for patrol camp.

"I packed what I thought you'd need," he said. "Your boots. The blue sweater. Your mother's hairbrush. The charger."

"You went through my room."

"I did."

His throat moved.

"I'm not asking you to forgive it."

Dorian folded his arms.

"He crossed into the Hollow's valley in the dark with no weapon and no backup," he said to me. "That's either an apology or an insult. I haven't decided."

"Alpha Ketch," Garrick said, still looking at me, "I'd like a minute."

"You get none."

"Then I'd like to say one thing to her in front of you."

Dorian looked at me.

I shrugged.

"One," I said.

Garrick stood up from the stone.

He was a big man, six foot three, and he moved slowly so nobody would take it for a threat.

When he stepped toward me I smelled him, pine and engine oil and the soap he'd used since I was thirteen.

My wolf lifted her head inside me.

She had done that since March, whenever he got close, and I had been calling it homesickness.

I did not move.

He stopped an arm's length away, and I watched him hold himself there.

His fingers flexed once at his side.

His breath caught and he let it out slowly through his nose.

"I'm not your father, Tilda," he said.

I had waited the whole day for something better than that.

"I know you aren't," I said. "You made that very clear in front of three hundred people."

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

He opened his mouth.

The muscle in his jaw jumped, and he shut it again.

"I can't tell you," he said.

"You can't."

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Eat something," Garrick said. "Sleep. Lock your door at night."

"Is that your whole answer?"

"For now."

I took the coat out of his hands.

My fingers brushed his, and his whole arm went rigid.

I told myself that was disgust.

I told myself a lot of things, standing on that road.

"Go home, Alpha Lindholm," I said. "You've done your duty."

He nodded once.

He turned, stepped back across the line on the stones, and shifted before he reached the tree line, a tall dark shape that dropped to all fours and was gone.

A collective murmur broke among the Iron Hollow wolves.

"Well," Odette said.

Dorian rubbed the back of his neck.

"He crossed a hostile border to hand you a coat," he said. "In my experience, a man doesn't do that for someone he's glad to see leave."

"In my experience, a man doesn't refuse in front of three hundred people to someone he wants to keep."

"Fair."

Odette took the duffel and linked her arm through mine.

"Come on, love. Coat on, kettle on."

I slid my arms into the sleeves.

It smelled like his house and the cedar chest at the foot of my bed.

Something crackled in the right pocket, so I reached in.

I pulled out a folded sheet of the pack's guardian form, a clean one, not mine.

The line at the bottom had been signed halfway.

It said "Garrick L" in black ink, and then the pen had dragged off the line in a long hard stroke, across the whole page, and torn the paper at the end.

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