When the Luna Walked Away novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What's Mine

Ilsa walks back into Redfern alive, pulls her name off the pack's deal in front of the council and wins her mother's land from Eileen, but her mother's ring is on Raine's hand.

I walked into the Redfern pack house at nine in the morning, through the front door, in my own boots.

The council was already sitting.

Twelve chairs around the long oak table, Tarran at the head, his mother at his right hand.

Raine was curled in the window seat behind him in my blue robe, the one with my initials on the cuff.

Every head turned.

Tarran's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth.

For one second his face showed me everything.

He hadn't expected to see me again.

Not ever.

Then he put the cup down and smiled for the room.

"Ilsa. Thank God. We've had search parties out."

"Have you?"

"Of course." He stood up and spread his hands. "You ran off in the night, sweetheart. You weren't well."

"I was at the old ranger lodge on Cutbank Ridge," I said. "You saw me there."

Nobody at the table moved.

Raine slid off the window seat with her hand on her belly.

"She's confused, Tarran. She does this."

"Take off my robe," I said.

She laughed.

"It's a robe."

"It's got my initials on the cuff. Take it off or I'll take it off you, and I'm in a mood to do it in front of the council."

Raine looked at Tarran.

Tarran looked at the twelve faces around his table and did the math.

"Give her the robe, Raine."

She stripped it off and threw it at my feet.

Under it she had on one of his shirts.

I left the robe on the floor.

"Sit down, Ilsa," Tarran said. "You're not well. We'll get you some help."

"I came for the timber agreement."

The council chairs creaked.

The river packs had signed with Redfern in the fall for every log we could cut off the north slope.

It was the biggest deal this pack had made in ten years.

It was mine.

I'd sat at four river packs' kitchen tables and doctored their pups for two years before any of them would shake on it.

"That agreement is the pack's," Tarran said.

"The river Alphas signed it with me. Their condition was my name on it. Read the last page."

His beta flipped to the last page.

His ears went red.

I took out my phone and called the Alpha of the biggest river pack on speaker.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Ilsa. We heard you were sick."

"I'm not sick. I'm not Redfern's Luna anymore, either. Tarran rejected me on Monday night."

The silence on the line was long.

"Then the deal's dead," the river Alpha said. "We shook with you, not him."

"Thank you."

I hung up.

Tarran was on his feet.

"You little..."

"Careful," I said. "Your council's listening."

He came around the table anyway.

He got close enough that I could smell Raine's perfume on his neck.

"I'll have you in Kettle Falls by dinner," he said, low. "Strapped to a cot. And when that bastard comes out of you, it goes to the nursery and you never see it again."

"Tarran."

His mother's voice.

Eileen Crale hadn't stood up.

She touched her pearls with two fingers and looked at her son.

"The Harvest Fair is on Saturday. Every pack in the valley will be on our grounds. You will not drag a pregnant woman through the yard screaming three days before it."

"Mother."

"Sit down."

He sat.

Eileen rose, smoothed her skirt and pointed at the study door.

"You. With me."

Her study smelled of lemon polish and old money.

She didn't offer me a chair.

"What do you want?"

"I want to leave."

That surprised her.

"Leave."

"In daylight, in front of whoever's watching. Not to Kettle Falls. Not to a nursery. I walk out and I take my son and I never come back."

"And what do you want for it? Your kind always wants something."

"Otter Lake."

Her eyebrows went up.

"My mother's land. The north shore, the stone house, the forty acres. It went into Crale hands when I mated your son. I want it back in mine."

"That's prime water."

"It's my mother's grave."

Eileen looked at me for a long, cold time.

Then she took a pen out of the drawer and pulled a deed out of a file without even having to search for it.

She'd known exactly where it was.

She signed it, blotted it and slid it across the desk.

"You'll be gone the day after the Fair. Quietly. No scenes. No more phone calls to the river packs."

"Done."

I folded the deed into my coat, right over the place where the vial had been.

"One more thing," I said. "My mother's ring. The moonstone. It was in my jewelry box."

Eileen smiled for the first time.

It wasn't a nice smile.

"Raine has it," she said. "She's wearing it on Saturday."

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