He Destroyed My Youth, Killed My Child, Now He Begs, But I Am Gone Forever novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: She Walks My Land

"Mother," Hamish said. "Not here."

"Here is exactly where." Beatrix tapped her cane on the gravel. "This is my family's ground, and you brought her onto it without asking the council."

She raised her voice and called the pack.

I heard the bell by the main house begin to ring.

People came up through the trees, two and three at a time, in work jackets and aprons.

At least forty arrived before the bell stopped.

Some of them looked at me with their mouths open.

Some of them had once handed me dishes to wash.

The pack had gathered at that stone on that day every year, and now they gathered around me.

"For five years we have remembered the child we lost," Beatrix said. "Today the woman who lost it comes back to stand on its grave."

My hands went cold.

"You were there," I said. "You locked me in silver."

"I locked you in silver to stop you shifting. You were screaming and clawing, and you fought the labor until the pup was gone." She said it to the crowd, not to me. "The healer told the whole council. You did it to yourself, girl."

A woman near the front covered her mouth.

Nobody in the pack had ever told me that.

Nobody had told me anything at all.

"That is not what the healer told me," I said.

"The healer is dead."

I hadn't known that either.

"And then you ran away and abandoned your mate," Beatrix went on. "Cut the bond in front of us all, with a blade, in the middle of his grief. And now you're back to what? Collect something? Blame someone?"

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