Called Me Used Good? Damn Cheating Alpha Go to Hell with Your Mistress novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What Was in the Tea

Roxanne learns Vera has drugged her wolf for three years and walks away from both of them to her grandmother's door.

Vera went white to the lips.

"It's mint tea," she said. "It's only mint tea, Roxy. Tell him."

I looked at the brown puddle running down toward my shoes.

"Mint and old pennies," I said. "That's what I always said it tasted like."

"That's the moon-fern," Ronan said. "It tastes like old coins to anyone who's born with a wolf in them. I've smelled it on you for three years, Miss Wendell."

I turned to him.

"You've smelled it on me for three years."

"Yes."

"And you never said."

His mouth went flat, and he didn't answer.

I would remember that, but I had no room for it yet.

I looked back at Vera.

"Every morning," I said. "Since the winter three years ago. You said my nerves were bad. You brought it to my door every single day."

"Because they were bad!" Vera's voice cracked. "You never slept, you cried in the clinic bathroom, I was trying to take care of you."

"What does wolfsbane do to a wolf?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"Roxy, I don't know what's in it. The pack healer gave me the recipe."

A long gray shadow fell across us both.

Warrick had come down the steps with Nash a pace behind him, and half the pack had spilled out of the hall to stand along the walls and watch.

He took in the thermos, the puddle and Ronan Hartley bending over it.

Then he did exactly what I should have expected, which was smile at me, sadly, with his head tilted.

"Roxanne. Hartley is a stranger who has been circling our border for years. Now he's feeding you a story about poison, today of all days."

"Then drink it," I said.

Warrick blinked.

"What?"

I dragged one finger through the spill on the stone and held it up to him.

"It's a nerve tonic from your healer. Lick it. Or have Vera lick it. She's been giving it to me for years, and I never once saw her drink it herself."

Vera took a step back.

Warrick didn't move at all.

The crowd along the wall was so quiet I could hear a truck on the road a quarter mile off.

"This is a circus," Warrick said, softly. "Roxanne, come home. We will talk about this in private."

"We talked in private for four years."

"You're being cruel."

"You called me used goods in front of three hundred people, and then you tried to have me carried out."

I heard myself say it, and it was perfectly calm.

"So no. We're done, Warrick. I won't be coming back to the pack house, and I won't be speaking to her again."

It was not a cry or a plea.

It was a plain sentence, and I felt it land in the air between us.

I looked at Vera one last time.

Eight-year-old Vera had shared her peanut butter sandwich with me on the first day of third grade, when my grandmother had forgotten my lunch.

I had loved her for twenty-one years.

"Why?" I asked.

She had her hand flat against her stomach again.

Her eyes went to Warrick, and away.

"It was kinder," she whispered. "You were never going to wake up, Roxy. We all knew it. I was only keeping you from hurting."

"Vera," Warrick said, sharply.

She shut her mouth.

Nash stepped forward then, and nobody had asked him to.

He picked up the empty steel thermos from the steps, held it to his nose, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he did not look at Warrick.

He tucked the thermos inside his jacket and said nothing at all.

It was the only answer I got from the Bloodmoon pack that day, and I took it.

"Miss Wendell," Ronan said, quietly, beside me. "My truck is at the curb. You don't have to walk."

"I know how to drive," I said. "I have my own car."

"Then I'll follow you to the edge of the territory, if you'll let me."

"No."

He nodded once and didn't argue.

He took a card from his pocket and held it out.

It had a number on it and nothing else.

"Ashfang is open to you. Not because of what you are. Because of what was done to you."

I took the card because my hand was shaking, and I wanted something to hold.

Then I walked to my own old Subaru in the registry lot, with my back straight and my thumb still bleeding, and I drove.

I drove to the very edge of Bloodmoon land, where the gravel road ran out under the pines and my grandmother's cabin leaned against the hill.

I had not told anyone I was coming.

I had not called.

Hester Lowry was standing on the porch with her arms folded, and a battered green duffel bag stood at her feet.

I knew the bag.

It was my own, from when I was twelve.

"I packed it the week you came to live with me," my grandmother said.

"I've had it ready for seventeen years."

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