Unwanted Shewolf novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Dustin's Price

I picked the page up off the wet grass while Rafe carried my brother into the house.

Mabel had Dustin on the kitchen table before I got through the door.

She cut his torn shirt away with kitchen scissors and swore at what she found under it.

"Two ribs cracked, one eye I can save, and a lip I'll stitch." She threaded a needle without looking at it. "Hold his head, Warden."

Rafe held his head.

I sat down on the bench by the lamp and unfolded the page.

It was yellow and soft, and the torn edge was ragged where it had come out of the binding.

The print was old pack script, and I read it slowly with my finger under each line.

"Of the Moon's Daughter," I read aloud. "When a daughter of the line is taken at the Hollow, the seat of the pack is hers."

Nobody in the kitchen spoke.

"The Alpha who held it before her holds it for her only. She lays her wrist upon the chair in the Moon Hall at the Blood Moon, and the pack shall kneel, or shall challenge, wolf to wolf."

I turned the page over to the bottom.

"No Alpha's word binds her, and no paper signed over her head binds her either."

There was handwriting in the margin, in brown ink, slanted and quick.

Mabel put her needle down and leaned over my shoulder.

"That's your mother's hand," she said. "She wrote on everything. She wrote on the bread box."

I read the margin to myself first.

Then I read it out loud, because it was meant to be said.

"Make them read it aloud. A law nobody reads aloud is only paper."

My throat closed up, and I let it, for a moment.

My mother had been eighteen, and she had stood in the Moon Hall with a pen and been braver than I had been at the same age.

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