I Faked My Death, and the Alpha at My Grave Has Lost His Wolf novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Pull-Out

By the middle of December I knew the sound of Anton's boots on the section-house step.

On Sundays he drove me out to the picnic turnout east of town to watch the sun go down behind the Glass Mountains.

We sat on his tailgate with a thermos and a bag of kolaches the owner made on Saturdays.

He told me the sale prices of cattle until I laughed.

He kept his hands to himself unless I put them somewhere.

He did not ask me to come home.

That Sunday the baby kicked twice against his palm, hard, and he looked at me with his whole plain face.

Then five pickups came up the highway in a line.

I knew the white one in front.

They pulled into the turnout and fanned out across the gravel with their engines running, and nobody got out for a while.

Anton stood up slowly and stepped in front of me.

Frank Matula climbed down from the lead truck with his hat in his hand.

Behind him came Rudy, with his shoulders hunched, and four of the Betas I had seen lower their eyes in the front row.

One of them was the gin foreman, who had once eaten eleven klobasnek on a bet at the Lodge picnic.

"Evening, Chair," Frank said. "Evening, honey. Don't get up."

"I'm standing," I said.

"So you are."

Frank looked at the sky, and at the mountains, and then at me.

"You've had a month," he said. "A kind man gives a woman a month."

"I told the Lodge I'd bring you home by Christmas Eve, and I'm a man of my word, so here I am to carry it out."

"I told you no," I said.

"I know what you told me."

"Then go home, Frank."

"Honey." He sighed. "I think nobody has explained the Book to you."

My stomach tightened.

"The Lodge buried you," Frank said, gently.

"You're in the Book of the Dead, in your grandmother's own hand, with the date of the Jeep. You're a dead woman in the Lodge's eyes, and the Lodge has a law about the children of dead women."

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