Chose Your SIL's Pup Over Ours and Left Me to Freeze, Now Meet the Luna Who Erased Your All novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Grave

Rhea demands to see the body and is refused, finds a small raw grave, and is banished at sunset by the Beta. She walks out onto the river ice, bleeding, toward the wolves on the far shore.

"I want to see him," I said.

I was on my knees on the stone, and I didn't remember getting there.

"Rhea, don't," Garrick said.

"I want to hold my son."

"He's already wrapped. The law says the dead go into the ground by dawn."

"It's past dawn."

"They did it while you slept."

I turned to Hester.

She was the one who had told me three weeks ago, with her hand on my belly, that I was carrying a boy.

"You were here," I said. "You were in this room. Tell me what you saw."

Hester's hands shook on her satchel strap.

"The cold was too much for him," she said, to the floor. "I'm sorry, child. I'm so sorry."

"Look at me."

She didn't.

"Hester, look at me and say it."

"Enough," Garrick said.

He reached down to help me up.

"Don't touch me."

My voice came out in a way I'd never heard before.

His hand stopped in the air between us.

I got up by myself, with one palm on the wall.

My legs held, barely.

The blood ran down the insides of my thighs, and I didn't care who saw.

"Where is the grave?" I said.

"Rhea."

"Where."

He told me.

I took my boots from the guard at the top of the stairs without a word.

Then I walked out of the pack hall in front of everyone.

It was full morning.

The whole of Ironbark stood in the yard, called out to watch.

Not one of them met my eyes.

At the far end of the street, the door of Lenore's house stood open, with a black ribbon tied to the post.

That was for her husband.

A white one hung under it.

That was new.

White meant a birth.

I looked at the ribbon and kept walking.

The pack graveyard sat on the hill behind the hall, where the ground froze too hard to dig for most of the winter.

I found the new grave without any help.

It was small, no longer than my arm.

The earth on top was raw and dark, piled high, with no stone yet and no name.

Whoever had dug it had been in a hurry.

I dropped to my knees on it.

I put both hands flat on the cold dirt and said his name, quietly, so nobody would hear it but him.

"Ewan."

Then I began to dig.

I got three handfuls out before a hand closed on the back of my coat.

"Stop that."

The Beta stood over me, with two enforcers behind him.

He was an old man with a white beard and the cold, patient voice he used on children.

He had served Garrick's father and then Garrick's brother, and I had never once heard him raise it.

"The dead are not disturbed," he said. "Not in Ironbark. Not by anyone."

"That's my son."

"That's an Ironbark pup, and he rests."

"Let me see him."

"No."

The enforcers took my arms and lifted me off the grave.

I fought them, and it took both.

Garrick had followed me up the hill.

He stood at the gate with his hands at his sides.

"Tell them to let me go," I said to him.

He opened his mouth.

He looked at the Beta, and then at the ground.

He said nothing.

That was my answer.

"You rejected your Alpha in the hall, before the whole pack," the Beta said, loud enough for the yard below to hear. "A rejecter doesn't stay on Ironbark land."

"Then let me bury my son and I'll go."

"You will go by sunset."

"Garrick."

He turned his face away.

I looked at the pack, standing in a ring on the frozen hill.

Women I had baked bread with.

Men I had run beside on the full moons.

Lenore was not there.

I could see her upstairs window from the hill, and the curtain was drawn.

"I'll go," I said.

The enforcers let go, and I stood by myself in the snow.

"You all heard him," I said. "A pup died in the cold last night, and the Alpha put the mother in that cell himself."

"Rhea," Garrick said.

"I rejected you because you'd do it again. Remember that tonight. Remember who sent me out."

Nobody said a word.

I went down the hill and walked out of Ironbark at sunset, with a coat that wasn't mine and a belly that still hurt.

Nobody gave me food.

Nobody gave me a bag.

Only the iron gate shut behind me, loud, and a bar slid down.

There was only one way to go.

The river ran along the edge of Ironbark land, frozen white from bank to bank.

On the far side, the trees belonged to Greywater, the pack my mate's family had hated for three generations.

I stepped onto the ice.

It held.

I walked, because my legs knew nothing else, and blood kept ticking down onto the white.

Halfway across, the cold reached the place where my son should have been, and my knees gave.

I got up.

I got up again.

Then the far bank, black with trees, began to move.

Wolves.

Six of them, grey and brown, came down out of the trees onto the ice and began to run toward me.

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