My Son Is the Secret That Will Break Them novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Seat Opposite

Torin's POV

My father sent for me at dusk, and I found him in the study with the green claims book open on the desk in front of him.

He had a new page tucked into the binding with a strip of tape.

It was a copy of my claim, in the healer's handwriting.

"Sit," he said.

I sat in the chair I had sat in as a boy, to be told off.

"I'm going to say this once," my father said. "Then I'm going to be an old man in a garden and you will not have to hear it again."

I waited.

"I took a girl of fifteen into this house, and her mother, and I said she was mine. When her mother died, I said it again at the grave. Then I let my niece tell me she'd run off with a boy, and I was relieved, because it was less to carry."

He did not look away from me.

"I let Thea go. I let you go without a word. I drank a cup my own niece handed me every morning, and thanked her for it."

"Father..."

"I am sorry," he said. "It is the worst thing I have done, and I've done some things. I don't ask you to say it's all right."

I did not say it was all right.

That was the only honest thing I had to give him, and he nodded.

He opened the desk drawer and took out the signet ring.

It was heavy gold, with the cedar crest, worn flat on the inside from a hundred years of Alphas.

He held it out.

"The chair is yours," he said. "And there's something else."

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