Chapter 13: Costly

Corbin's POV

I didn't wait for the full moon.

If I waited, I would find a reason to make it smaller, and I knew myself well enough to be afraid of that.

At noon the next day I had Tobias ring the bell in the great hall, and three hundred wolves came in from the town with their coats still on.

My cast was heavy, and my knees were not steady.

Anneliese stood at the back by the doors, with her arms folded and her face closed.

She had not told me she would come, and I had not dared to ask.

I walked into the circle where I had bled at the Gala, and I didn't take the chair they had set for me.

"I'm the Alpha of this pack," I said. "I've got something to say, and I'm not going to say it well."

The hall went still.

"Two weeks ago my wife walked into the medical center to have silver cut out of her back."

"I had been gone nine days. I came home, and I told her to wait one more week, in front of everyone in this room who was in that lobby."

Somebody near the front looked at his boots.

"She had waited two years already," I said. "She had waited every time before that, too, and I called it just this once."

"On her birthday I left a dinner she cooked, and I came home when the candles were burned down to the plate."

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