I Don't Come Back to My Alpha Again novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Exiles

I didn't sleep that night either.

I kept seeing Ansel's hand on Tobin's shoulder.

At first light I packed my father's old canvas rucksack with everything I could carry.

Bread. Cheese. Four cans of peaches. Socks. Two bottles of antiseptic. A bag of lemon drops, because Rhoda would kill for a lemon drop.

Beck watched me from the couch with his coffee.

"You know it's twenty miles," he said.

"I walked it every day for five years. Inside the walls, anyway."

"I could drive you."

"Ansel would hear about it in an hour. You're already the man who sleeps on my couch."

He considered that. "I do sleep on your couch."

"So people are going to talk."

"People are going to talk anyway." He set his mug down. "Take the bear spray. The ferals come down to the wall in the mornings."

I took the bear spray.

The road up the valley ran past the lake and into the pines, and then the pines got thinner and the rocks got bigger, and then there was the wall.

Twelve feet of gray stone, as old as the pack.

And the gates.

I'd looked at those gates from the inside every day for five years.

From the outside they looked smaller.

There was no warden in the little stone hut beside them. Ansel's Beta hadn't bothered to show up yet.

I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled.

Three short, one long.

Nothing happened for a minute.

Then a shape came down the rocks on the inside of the wall, fast and sure-footed, with a long white braid swinging behind her.

"Well, damn," Rhoda said. "Look what the cat dragged back."

She was seventy-one, and she was the smallest woman I had ever met, and I reached through the bars and hugged her so hard her feet came off the ground.

"Put me down, girl, you'll snap my hip."

I didn't put her down.

She smelled like cave damp and woodsmoke and the mint she chewed for her teeth.

← Chapter 5 · All chapters · Chapter 7 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend