Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Osmund Yields

My father saw their faces, and for the first time in my life I watched him have no answer.

"Your mother fell," he said. "She had a weak heart. It was a tea she drank for her chest."

"You said you poured it in slowly," said the gray-haired elder, from the rope.

Her voice was flat and terrible.

"I said no such thing."

"We heard you."

"All of us," said another voice, and another.

He turned in a circle on his knees, naked and old, with his broken wrist hanging.

Nobody in that field looked at him as their alpha.

I lay on my back and stared up at the lanterns.

The root was in every part of me, slow and thick and sweet, and it told me to close my eyes.

My mother had been on a kitchen floor.

I had been nine years old and asleep upstairs.

Something in my chest uncoiled and turned over.

It was not the white wolf, not yet.

It was only me, and it was fourteen years of me, and it was finished with being quiet.

The silver crescent on my shoulder burned.

I felt Dorran's name in it, hot and steady, from across the rope.

I rolled over onto my hands and knees.

"Stay down," my father said, scrambling backward. "Tilda, you'll hurt yourself."

I got one foot under me.

"Stay down!"

I stood up.

The white wolf came up through the poison all at once, and it did not hurt.

I stood over him on four feet with my breath steaming, and he stopped moving.

His mouth opened.

I put one forepaw in the center of his chest and pushed him flat in the grass.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Claiming the Spare Twin from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.