My Alpha Chose Her, So I Let Him Bury Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Own Funeral

Morven watches the Ironwood pack bury an empty coffin from the ridge, with Bram's chest at her back. Asked about the heir, Cormac says there never was one.

I was not supposed to leave the bed for three days.

I left it the next morning at ten.

Bram found me in the hall with one hand on the wall and my splinted fingers held against my chest.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You're going to watch it," he said.

"I'm going to watch it."

"Your ribs will tear."

"Then I'll tear."

He said something under his breath about stubborn women and then bent and lifted me against his chest.

It should have embarrassed me.

I was six months pregnant and size fourteen on a good day, and Cormac had never once carried me anywhere, not even over the threshold.

Bram carried me up the ridge path.

He smelled of cedar and cold water, and each step rolled his chest under my cheek.

"Put your good arm around my neck," he said. "I'd rather you didn't fall off."

I did.

His pulse was slow and heavy against my wrist.

I decided not to think about it.

The ridge looked straight down on the Ironwood cemetery, a square of mown grass behind the pack hall with a stand of black pines at its edge.

Bram set me on a flat rock behind a juniper and crouched beside me, one hand braced on the stone at my back.

He handed me a pair of field glasses.

Below us, four hundred wolves stood in black.

I had spent eight years learning those faces, the bakers and the loggers and the schoolteachers.

Half of them had never said my name without a pause before it.

A plain pine coffin sat on two trestles beside an open grave.

It was closed.

There was nothing in it.

I lowered the glasses, my breath rattling.

Bram's hand moved from the rock to the middle of my back.

It stayed there, warm and steady, and I leaned into it before I could stop myself.

Cormac walked to the head of the grave.

He wore the black coat I had steamed for him on Sundays.

His face was gray and drawn, and every inch of it looked like grief.

I hated how well it fit him.

"Morven Colquhoun was my wife," he said. His voice carried up the hill, deep and rough. "She was not an easy woman to understand."

A murmur ran through the crowd.

I gripped the glasses until the splints bit my skin.

"She never forgave herself for my brother, and yesterday it finally took her. She walked to the edge of that gorge on her own, and the river took her."

On her own.

I could hear Bram's breathing change.

Felicity stood at Cormac's elbow in a black dress that was too long for her, one hand through his arm.

The moonstone hung at her throat.

She wept without sound and let the tears run down, slow and pretty, and every few seconds she looked up at him.

I had seen that look in a mirror once.

I'd been wearing it for two years.

"Did you see that?" I whispered.

"I saw," Bram said, very low.

"She's not crying."

"No."

An old elder with a white beard stepped forward from the front row.

I knew him.

He had given the blessing at my wedding in a voice sour and pinched.

"Alpha," he said. "Forgive me, but the pack has one more question, and it can't wait."

Cormac inclined his head.

"The Luna was carrying an heir. Is the pack to mourn a child as well?"

Four hundred people went still.

I stopped breathing.

I knew what a decent man would say.

I had been waiting eight years to hear what he was.

Cormac took a long, slow look around the grass.

"There was no heir," he said.

The wind hushed in the pines.

"She told me she was pregnant to keep me. The pack doctor never gave me a report. I never saw a scan." His voice did not shake once. "A woman who would lie about a child would lie about anything. I will not put a stone up for a baby that never existed."

Somebody gasped.

Somebody else said "Gods," quietly.

Felicity pressed her face against his sleeve.

My hands began to shake so badly that Bram had to take the glasses out of them.

He didn't say a word.

He just put an arm around my shoulders and held on.

Down in the cemetery, the pack doctor stood at the back of the crowd.

He had pressed a cold scope to my belly in March and told me, smiling, that my son had a heartbeat like a drum.

He looked at the grass and said nothing.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

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