Chapter 19: The Twenty-Eighth

Rowena's POV

The Council hall held eight hundred people, and there were more outside the doors.

I walked in on my father's arm, with my mother on the other side of me.

Nobody spoke. I could hear my own shoes on the marble.

The King's chair at the head of the hall was empty.

Three old Alphas sat below it at a long table, gray-bearded and tired, with the clerk at their elbow.

Evander sat in the front row, in plain clothes, with his hands on his knees.

He did not look at the bench. He looked at me.

Lenore stood at the petitioner's rail in her best blue dress.

She had her bag in front of her and her hair perfectly pinned.

She was weeping, a little, in the right places.

"I have been the house elder of Greenhaven for thirty years," she said to the bench.

"I took in an orphan child. I raised her as my own."

"I will not deny she has suffered. But she has been led astray by powerful men, and she is not well."

A murmur went around the hall.

I stood and said my name.

"Rowena Ashdown, once Winslow. I am the abandoned partner, and I am here to end the bond."

"Three years," the first old Alpha said. "Lawful. Do you have anything to put before us?"

"Yes. I have a great deal."

I put it down piece by piece.

First my father, who stood with the iron box and read the sixteen stamps aloud, one for each spring.

Then the clerk, who held up the household stamp and the Royal Post ledger, side by side.

Then Kendrick.

He walked to the rail without a coat or a badge. His commission pins were gone from his collar.

"I swear on the border book," he said.

"I stood my watch every night for three years. The visits my mother filed are false."

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