Wrong Bond: Your Omega Is Driving Me Crazy novel · Chapter 21 of 32

Chapter 21: Not Yours to Ask

Linden looked at Osric for a long time.

At the face he'd woken next to for three years, turned away from him.

At the hand pressed to Osric's heart.

"You'll hear it in the Ring," Linden said.

Osric's head jerked up.

"That's not an answer."

"No. It isn't." Linden had said the same words to Ivor on the gold, the first night. They felt different now. "You don't get to ask me that, Osric. Not here, by a well, where nobody's listening. You'll hear it with everyone else."

"If it was you..." Osric's voice cracked. "If it was you, why wouldn't you tell me?"

"Because you'd have kept me for what I could do." Linden folded his arms. "The way you kept me for the treaty."

Osric stared at him.

Up on the wall, Ivor shifted his weight, and a little smoke went up into the cold.

Osric looked up at it.

Then he turned and walked out of the gate without another word, and his riders scrambled after him.

The gifts came the next morning.

The big rider carried them up the goat path, red-faced and sweating.

A new silver chain, the Fenmore chain, heavier than the one Linden had dropped in Osric's cup.

A cloak of black wolf fur, the kind only Fenmores wear.

A cask of the dark Blackmere wine, the kind Linden used to warm for Osric.

And a letter, in Osric's hand.

Come home. Lucian goes back to his father's house. You have your chair. We forget the Court.

Prim read it over Linden's shoulder and made a noise.

Linden put the letter back in the box.

He put the chain on top of it.

He wrapped the wolf cloak around the cask and tied it with string.

"Take it all back," he told the rider. "Tell him I don't want a chair. Tell him I've got a dragon who bakes."

The rider looked at Ivor.

Ivor smiled at him, with all his teeth.

The rider took the box and went down that path faster than he'd come up.

All day Linden couldn't get warm, and it wasn't the cold.

It was the letter, and how easy it had been to write. You have your chair. As if Linden had ever wanted the chair.

Ivor found him at dusk, sitting on the gate step.

He didn't say anything.

He held out his hand.

Linden took it, and Ivor led him back inside, past the hoard-hall, up a stair Linden had never climbed.

It went up and up, round and round, inside the highest tower of the keep.

At the top was a door.

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