He Let My Sister Die, So I Ended His Bloodline novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Bluebonnets

Nessa scatters Cara's ashes in a Texas bluebonnet field, and Slade arrives with two elders and a council challenge just as the last of them blows away.

The guest house had a narrow bed, a lock on the inside of the door, and a window that faced a field of dark grass.

I did not sleep.

At first light I walked out to the main yard with the tin in both hands and found Ronan Mercer already there, sitting on the tailgate of his truck with two mugs.

"You said one night," he said, and held one out.

"It's morning."

"Technically, yes."

The coffee was strong and bitter, and I drank it standing up.

"Where's the bluebonnet field?" I asked.

He looked at me for a moment.

"Nobody told me that was what you wanted."

"Cara bookmarked a picture of one three years ago. Outside Austin, in April. She said if she ever got a new kidney, she'd lie down in it and refuse to get up."

I had not said that out loud to anyone.

I wasn't sure why it came out in front of a man I had known for a day.

He set his mug down.

"There's a field on the east edge of my land," he said. "It's in bloom late this year. I'll drive you."

"I don't need an escort."

"You need a ride," he said. "I'll stay in the truck."

He did stay in the truck.

He parked on the gravel track at the edge of the field and turned the engine off, and he did not get out.

I walked in alone.

The flowers came up to my knees, deep blue with white at the tips, and the wind moved through them in long waves.

I knelt in the middle and set the tin in the grass.

"Hey, Care," I said.

My voice cracked on the second word, and I let it.

"I got you here. It took longer than you wanted, and I took the wrong flight, and there's a man in a truck who thinks I'm a stray dog he found at the airport."

I laughed once, wetly.

"You'd like him. He's rude, and he has a very nice jaw."

I stayed there until the sun was over the trees.

I told her what I had done.

I told her I had left the pup behind, and that I wasn't sorry, and that if she wanted to hate me for it she could.

I told her I would make Slade say her name out loud, in front of everyone, until he understood what he had let happen.

Then I opened the tin.

The ash was lighter than I had expected.

I tipped it out slowly, and the wind took it across the flowers.

Behind me, a car door shut.

It was not Ronan's door.

I turned around, still on my knees, with the empty tin in my hands.

Two black sedans had pulled up behind Ronan's truck.

Slade Haught was standing between them in a charcoal suit that was wrong for a field, with two older men in Cedar Ridge colors at his shoulders.

He had come straight from the airport.

His tie was crooked, and I had never seen his tie crooked.

He looked at the empty tin in my hands.

He looked at the ash still drifting out over the blue.

"I asked you to wait," he said.

His voice was very low.

"You asked for a lot of things."

I stood up.

Ronan had gotten out of the truck after all.

He leaned against the fender with his arms folded, but I saw how his weight had shifted forward onto the balls of his feet.

Slade walked into the flowers.

The two elders stayed on the gravel, and one of them had a folder under his arm.

Slade stopped an arm's length from me.

Up close, his eyes were amber and red-rimmed, and he looked like he had not slept either.

For one second I almost felt sorry for him.

Then I remembered the sound of his voice going soft for Peyton.

"Joanie told me you called me that night," he said. "Three times."

"I called you five."

"I was in a meeting."

"You were comforting your assistant."

His jaw tightened.

"I did not know she was dying, Nessa."

"I told you she was dying. I told you in the hallway of the treatment center with the phone in my hand. I told you in your study."

"You said she needed treatment. You didn't say she would die in a week."

"That is what a kidney match means."

He flinched.

It was small, and I would have missed it if I hadn't been waiting for it.

"I have the pack's lawyers with me," he said. "They'll hear whatever you have to say. But you will say it in front of the council, in California, with the contract still standing."

He glanced at the elder with the folder.

"I filed a challenge this morning."

"On what grounds?"

"On the grounds that you are my mate and you are carrying my heir."

Ronan pushed off the fender.

"She isn't," he said. "She told a whole airport so yesterday."

Slade turned his head and looked at Ronan for the first time.

He had never met him, and I watched him decide, in one breath, that he hated him.

"Stay out of this, Mercer."

"No," Ronan said. "It's my field."

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