My Family Forgot I Existed, So I Left Them Behind novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Torin's POV: The Man Who Held the Rifle

Torin's POV

I left her asleep with her palm in a fresh bandage and the bite on her neck turned dark.

She had her face in my pillow and her hair across both our shoulders, and she smelled of me.

I stood in the bedroom doorway for a full minute, and I could not remember what I had been afraid of.

For three months I had braced for the day she chose them.

She had chosen me, and she had said *take me home,* and I was still waiting to wake up.

I put on a coat.

The Beta's truck was parked at the cairn, dark, with the engine off.

He sat on the tailgate in the snow with a canvas bag between his boots.

"I'm not armed," he said, before I'd gone ten steps.

"I didn't think you were."

"I thought about it." He rubbed his scarred chin. "Coming here. I've served Rhys Harlan twenty years. I've never lied to him once. Then Miss Odette told me to carry a jar up the hill."

"What jar?"

He opened the bag.

It was an old mason jar with a cracked lid.

Inside, a few spoonfuls of pale dust clung to the glass, and the rest was grey metal filings that glittered under my flashlight.

"She gave me this yesterday afternoon," he said. "The pale part is stone. She swept it off the altar the night of the fight, and kept it in her closet for three months."

"She kept the stone."

"She said she needed one thing in the house that was hers." He shook his head. "I thought it was grief. Then she handed me the silver filings from the clinic supply and told me to mix them in and pack the hollow before the rite. I asked her what for."

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