They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Pack I Built
The Keystone Moot came round again on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, a year after I had walked out of the hall.
The Culm Bank pack stood on the cemetery hill at dawn in new colors.
They were black and anthracite gray with a third stripe of cream down the sleeve, which the parish women had sewn on in July.
It was the stripe for the dead.
Seventy-three wolves stood among the stones.
They were no longer only the ones Black Diamond had dropped.
A third of them were Black Diamond's own, who had come over after the old Alpha stepped down.
The new Alpha of Black Diamond stood at the cemetery gate with his hat in his hand.
He was a small, balding, patient man who had run the Hazleton road crew.
He had asked my leave to stand there, and I had given it.
Tomas and Peter stood at the back in work clothes, with shovels.
They had dug fourteen graves between them since the pierogi sale.
They had dug them in forty minutes and forty-five, through shale and clay and the frozen February ground.
They had gone down the hill afterward with blistered hands and said nothing.
I had not forgiven them.
In January I had watched Peter lay the first shovelful on a child's grave and break down in the snow.
I had gone and stood beside him without a word, and that was not forgiveness either.
I did not know what it was.
I let it be.
The girl with the dog stood at my left hand.
She had turned twenty in the spring.
Her collie had fathered four pups with a stray from the Number Six patch, and the pups ran in and out between the stones.
The bartender had a doctor's name for her cough now, and no longer smoked.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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