Rejected for Being Barren, Now the Alphas Kneel novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Terms

I went out to the yard in my bare feet, and I shut the door behind me so the children would sleep.

Theron stood where the grass met the pines, with his hands open.

"Where are Perrin's men?" I asked.

"Perrin doesn't know I'm here."

"Then you came alone, with no coat, to the house of a woman you left in a blizzard."

"I didn't leave you," Theron said. "Perrin did."

"You told him I was useless, in a hallway, an hour before the ceremony."

He flinched.

For a moment he looked like the boy I had grown up beside, the one who used to share his dinner roll with me behind the stables.

Then the look went away.

"I was twenty-one and I was told you were barren," he said. "Everyone believed it. I believed it."

"You believed it fast."

"Rhea, listen. My father is dying. He has a week, maybe less."

"I'm sorry for him."

"He says the seat goes only to a Stagg child." His jaw worked. "And I have none."

I waited.

"Corinna and I have been bonded ten years," Theron said. "She has never carried. Not once. The Healer told us last spring that the bond is hollow, whatever that means."

I said nothing.

I was thinking that a hollow bond was exactly what a Healer would find between two people who were not mates.

"So," Theron said. "Six pups. Born in the year you left."

"Say what you came to say."

"Tell the council they're mine."

The yard was very quiet.

"The dates fit," he said. "You were my mate. You could say you were already carrying when you ran."

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