The End of Us novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The Nursery Door
I let him kneel for a long time.
Two hundred wolves watched the man who had been their Alpha ask for the worst post I had.
"Get up," I said.
Quinton stayed where he was.
"Get up, Quinton. I'm not going to talk to the top of your head."
He rose.
"I won't take you into my rooms," I said. "I won't take you into my confidence, and I won't take you into my bed. You understand that."
"Yes."
"I won't take you into the Council either. You lost your wolf, and you lost your chair, and you'll earn nothing back by wearing the same coat."
"I don't want any of it."
"Then here's what I have. The nursery wing needs a night guard. It's a door, a chair and a lamp. You don't carry a blade. You answer to the nurse. You sleep in the stable loft."
A murmur of surprise ran down the benches.
Somebody whispered that it was an insult.
"Is it?" I asked him.
"No." His voice shook. "Thank you, Alpha."
"Don't thank me yet."
That night, I walked up the nursery stairs and found him already at the door.
He sat on a hard kitchen chair in the corridor, in a stable hand's brown coat, with a single oil lamp at his feet.
He looked at me, and he started to stand.
"Sit," I said.
He sat.
The baby was asleep in the room behind him, in a cradle Ginny had carried up from the village.
I had asked Ginny to move into the room beside it.
She stood in the doorway now with her cast folded across her chest, and she did not smile.
"So," she said.
Quinton looked at the floor.
"You're the one who read the text."
"Yes."
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