They Called Me an Abomination and Ordered Me Killed, So I Came Back as the Wolf They Buried novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

She names five numbered terms and he accepts each; Bastien takes the Alpha's truck apart and Remy sees the white roots in the boy's hair.

He was back at seven the next morning with a box of doughnuts and a thermos.

I was already in the bay, because Saturday is when the crawfishermen bring their engines in before the traps go back in the water.

I had three outboards on the stands and a skiff on the trailer.

I said, "I'm working."

"I know," Remy said.

"I'll stand over there."

He stood over there, by the parts drum, with the doughnut box in both hands.

He looked like a man holding a baby he'd been told not to wake.

I let him stand for ten minutes.

Then I said, without looking up, "Put them on the table.

"Tell me what you want."

He put the box down.

"I want to know what you want."

I stopped with the wrench on a lower-unit bolt.

"Nobody's asked me that," I said.

"I'm asking."

"I'll tell you," I said.

"But I'm going to say it in numbers, and you're going to say yes or no to each one, because if you say 'I'll try' I'll hit you with this."

I raised the wrench.

He actually smiled.

It was a small thing, quickly gone, but I had not seen it in eight years and it went into me like a hook.

I pulled a grease pencil off the bench and wrote on the whitewashed wall by the door, in capitals, five lines.

One.

I stay at the shed.

I do not go to the pack house, I do not go to the levee, I do not go to the church.

Two.

Bastien chooses his own days.

If he wants to sit in your truck, he sits in your truck.

If he doesn't, he doesn't, and you don't ask why.

Three.

Nobody in your pack touches me or the boy.

Not a hand.

Not a wolf.

Not your mother.

Four.

I can say no at any sundown.

Any sundown, to anything you ask, and you take it.

Five.

I owe your pack nothing.

Not my wolf, not my work, not an apology.

Not one day of my life.

I capped the pencil.

"Those are the terms," I said.

"If you break one, you leave my gravel and I never speak to you again."

Remy read the wall.

He read it twice, the way he had once read the levee tables for his engineering exam, with his lips moving a little.

When he was done he said, "Yes."

"To all of them?" I asked.

"To all of them."

He scrubbed a hand across his jaw.

"I'm not going to ask you to come home," he said.

"I came with a flag and a claim, and I was wrong to."

"You said that like you rehearsed it," I said.

"I did, in the truck, for forty minutes," he said.

I crossed my arms.

"And the claim?"

"It's what the council told me to say," Remy said.

"I'll tell you the rest when I know it.

"Right now I know you're alive and my name is on a boy, and that's all I'm asking to know today."

I turned back to the engine.

I did not trust myself to say anything.

I heard a screen door slam at the back of the lot and the clatter of small feet on gravel.

"Mama!

"Mama, is he the man with the truck?"

Bastien came around the corner of the bay in his school clothes, with a sticky face and the dog at his heels.

He was holding a screwdriver in one fist.

He stopped dead six feet from Remy and looked up and up.

"You're tall," he said.

"I get that," Remy said, and his voice was not steady.

"Is that your truck?"

"It's the pack's," Remy said.

Bastien squinted at it.

"Is it a Dodge?"

"It's a Ram," Remy said.

"What's the displacement?" Bastien asked.

Remy looked at me, and I did not help him.

"Six-point-seven liters," he said.

"Cummins diesel."

The boy's eyes went wide with pure joy.

"Can I look at it?"

"Bastien," I said.

"What do you say?"

"Please can I look at it, sir?"

I thought of the second term on the wall, and of what I had written, and I looked at Remy's face.

He was white to the lips.

He looked at me, and then he knelt down in the gravel in his good work pants, so that his eyes were level with my son's.

"You can look at anything you want," he said.

"It's not mine.

"But I'll hold the hood."

They went off across the lot together, the tall man and the small boy, and the dog went with them.

I stood in the bay door with the wrench in my hand.

Twenty minutes later I walked over to see what was going on.

The truck's hood was up.

Remy had taken off the air filter housing and set it on the gravel.

He was explaining how the turbo worked with a stick, drawing in the dirt, and Bastien was lying on his stomach beside him with his chin in his hands and the screwdriver already half in a bolt.

"Don't unscrew that," Remy said.

"Why not?" Bastien asked.

"Because I need to drive home," Remy said.

"You live at the pack house," Bastien said.

"Right now I live in a truck at the church."

"That's silly," Bastien told him.

"Mama says a truck's not a house."

The boy sat up.

The sun hit the top of his head, and I saw what I had been trying not to see since the day before.

His hair is brown like his father's, almost black at the ends.

At the roots, close to the scalp, it grows in white.

It had always done that.

I'd told the school it was a pigment thing.

Poteau, the dog, put his big head on Bastien's knee the way he always did, and would not move it.

Remy looked at the boy's head.

I saw him see it.

He went very still.

He did not say anything.

He looked at the white roots, and then he looked up at me across my son's head, and what was in his face was not a claim, and it was not guilt.

It was fear.

I had never seen that on him in all my life.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend