The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Nothing Held Back

Vidar's hand closed flat on the table beside the phone.

I leaned over it before he could speak.

"Moonrise is six-oh-two," I said. "I looked it up. Wear something warm."

A soft laugh came down the line.

"You're sleeping outside these days, aren't you?" I said. "Off Rask land. With what you could carry."

The laugh stopped.

"Meat that talks," Torvald said, and hung up.

Tove put her spoon down in her soup.

"I'm going to bite him," she said. "Not tonight. But I'm going to."

"Get in line," I said.

Vidar hadn't moved.

He was looking at the dead phone on his table.

Then he pushed his chair back and went out of the kitchen without a word.

I heard him on the stairs, three flights, fast and barefoot.

Tove looked at me.

"He's not having a fit," she said. "I'd hear it."

"I know."

He came back down in two minutes.

He put something on the table between our soup bowls.

A white envelope, soft at the corners, the ink of my name run a little where the lake had touched it.

"You said no secrets," he said. "This is the last one I've got."

Tove stood up so fast her chair rocked.

"I'll be in the pantry," she said. "With the door shut. Eating crackers very loudly."

She took her bowl with her.

The pantry door shut, and a second later a sleeve of crackers crinkled on the other side of it, loud as a fire.

I almost laughed.

I didn't touch the envelope.

"You told me you'd write it again," I said.

"I didn't. I took it out every night and put it back." He sat down across from me. "It's the same pages."

"What's in it?"

He answered the way I'd made him promise to.

"Which of the council you can trust. Which three of them you can't."

His jaw worked.

"How to keep Tove in school when she quits, because she'll try."

"I heard that," Tove said through the pantry door.

"And the last page," Vidar said.

"What's on the last page?"

He looked at me across the table.

His eyes were gray and very steady, and his hands were not.

"The thing I've never said to you," he said.

The kitchen went still.

Even the crackers stopped.

I picked up the envelope.

It was thicker than I remembered.

I could feel the edges of the pages through the paper, and I knew which one he meant without opening it.

"When did you write it?"

"The morning after the first night," he said. "Four o'clock. You were asleep with your hand on my chest."

I turned it over in my fingers.

Then I got up and opened the door of the woodstove.

The heat came out at my face.

"Linnea," he said.

"You don't get to say that to me from a grave."

I held the envelope up between us.

"You don't get to put it on paper for after, when I can't answer you," I said.

"If you ever say it, you say it with a pulse I can feel."

He stood up slowly.

He came around the table and put his hand over mine on the envelope.

His palm was cooler than it should have been.

"Together," he said.

We put it in together.

The corner caught first.

Then his handwriting went brown and curled and went up, and neither of us looked away until it was gone.

He didn't let go of my hand.

"Come home," he said quietly.

"Tomorrow."

His face fell, and he caught it.

"In daylight," I said. "I want the whole pack watching me carry my bag back up those steps."

The pantry door banged open.

"Oh, thank God," Tove said with her mouth full. "Your couch is killing me."

The next afternoon I parked my truck in the courtyard at Greywater.

I pulled two contractor bags out of the bed and slung them over my shoulders.

Nine fleeces and one dress.

The courtyard was busy with Sunday chores.

A couple of men were splitting wood by the gatehouse, and kids were chasing the gray pup around the dry fountain.

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