After My Alpha Drugged Me for Ten Years novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Quiet Room

Trudy had the tin open on the clinic counter ten minutes after the SUVs were gone.

She held a pinch of the dried leaf to her nose, wrinkled it, and dropped it into a glass dish.

"That's not chamomile," she said. "That's monkshood root, ground fine, with a little wolfsbane flower. Enough in this tin to keep a wolf quiet for a year."

"Ruby gave it to me as a gift," I said.

"Ruby gave it to you as a leash."

Rowan stood behind her with his arms folded, and the cloth was still pressed against his nose.

"Can you prove where it came from?" he said.

Trudy flipped the tin over with a pair of tongs.

On the bottom was a maker's stamp pressed into the tin.

Next to it was a small mark in red wax, and she had to tilt it toward the lamp to read.

"That's an Alliance stamp," she said slowly. "For the Chair's private pharmacy. You can't buy this. You'd have to be given it."

Nobody spoke.

Ruby's father was the Chair.

"So it isn't just Ramsay," I said.

"Maybe it isn't just Ruby," said Rowan.

We looked at each other.

Trudy locked the tin in her steel cabinet, and I felt the click in my teeth.

"Nobody touches that," she said. "Not even me, until I've got gloves and a witness."

Supper was a pot of stew and a heel of bread.

Eight Cedar Fork wolves crammed in around the kitchen table.

I hadn't eaten at a table with people since I was nineteen.

I held the spoon too hard, and nobody mentioned it.

A big bearded wolf at the end of the table told a long story about the time Rowan had tried to ride a horse through a screen door.

"I was eleven," Rowan said.

"You were twenty-two."

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