My Alpha Found a New Love novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Daughter

I looked at the mark on her cheek.

It was a big hand.

Bigger than mine.

The fingers went up into her hairline.

"Don't wake Papa," Freya whispered. "Please. He'll kill him, and then everyone will say it was my fault."

"Then we wake your grandmother."

"Kari..."

"I'm not hearing this alone on a dark landing, Freya. I've been alone on a landing with your family before."

Solveig opened her door on the second knock, in her plaid bathrobe, with her white braid down her back and a poker in her hand.

She looked at her granddaughter's face.

She put the poker down.

"Come in," she said. "Both of you. Sit by the fire."

Freya sat on the very edge of a footstool with her bare feet tucked under her.

She told it in pieces.

Rune had come back up from the lake with his wrist in a splint, white with pain and rage.

She'd asked him if he meant it, about rejecting her.

He'd said she should be grateful he'd ever looked at her.

And then he'd hit her.

"He said I was a stepping stone," Freya said to her knees. "He said once he had the seat he'd mark a real woman."

Solveig's hand stopped stroking her hair.

"I can't reject him here," Freya said. "Not with the challenge. Everyone would say I was scared. I want to go. Tonight, or tomorrow. Somewhere he can't follow me. I've got money. I just need someone to help me get out the gate without him knowing."

She looked up at me.

Her eyes were huge and wet and very blue.

"I know I don't deserve it from you."

"No," I said. "You don't."

She flinched.

I looked at Solveig.

Solveig looked back at me, and waited, and let it be mine.

"One chance," I said.

"One. And it costs you something. My brother bled on the boathouse path because your friends thought it was funny. Tomorrow at breakfast, in front of the whole hall, you stand up and you apologize to him. Out loud. By name."

"Yes," Freya said.

Just like that.

"Yes. Of course. Anything."

She wiped her face with both hands and smiled at me, shaky and grateful.

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