Discarded Housewife, Chosen by Her Protector novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Offer

The Elders sent for me that same evening, and they did not send a note.

Five of them came to the Redfern gate in a black car, gray-haired men and women in coats that smelled of cedar.

The oldest, a woman with a cane, bowed her head to me on the gravel.

"Miss Dunbar," she said. "We would like you at the hall tonight."

"My name is Hart," I said.

"Your mother chose that name to keep you alive," the Elder said. "It has done its work. Come, and bring your Alpha if you like."

"He isn't my Alpha."

"He is your something," she said dryly, and I heard Ronan cough behind me.

The Blackwater hall was a long room of dark timber, with a fire at one end and a table before it.

Ansel stood by the window with his hands behind his back.

Lorna sat at the side of the room in a plain chair, her hands in her lap.

Neither of them looked surprised to see me.

"Sit," the Elder said, and I sat.

She lowered herself into the chair across from me and rested both hands on the cane.

"I will tell you what your family did," she said. "Ansel was right to throw that name in the courtroom, and wrong about why it frightens them."

"Tell me."

"A Dunbar wolf cannot be commanded. You know that, because you have felt it." She nodded toward Ansel. "And a Dunbar voice moves every wolf that hears it, of any pack, of any rank. Your grandfather once stopped a war by saying a single sentence in a field. Three hundred wolves sat down."

Sable lifted her head inside me and went very still.

"Every Alpha alive then understood that one family could take any seat it liked," the Elder said. "So they burned the family."

"You mean the old Alpha," I said.

"I mean all of us who stood by and let it be done." Her eyes were steady and tired. "I did not light the fire. I also did not stop it, and I have had twenty-two years to think about that."

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