Chapter 4: Sunday Supper

Joxe Urrutia did not come into the wagon.

He stopped on the bottom step, with the morning behind him, and held out a canvas bag.

"Clean clothes," he said. "Your mother packed them. There's food in the cooler."

He did not look past his son's shoulder.

He kept his eyes on the sage, and his reading glasses swung on their cord.

"Supper's at six," Joxe said. "Both of you."

"Papa," Mikel started.

"At six."

The Alpha walked back to his truck, and his shoulders looked older than they had the day before.

Fionn sat on the bunk in Mikel's shirt and did not breathe until the engine faded.

"He knows," he said.

"He's known since the Ring."

"He didn't say anything."

"He doesn't. That's how he does it." Mikel dropped the bag on the bunk. "Eat something. The heat comes back tonight."

At six o'clock the long table in the ranch kitchen was set for seven.

Fionn walked in with his collar buttoned to his chin.

The kitchen smelled of chorizo and peppers and the lamb stew his mother had learned from his stepfather's mother.

Everyone looked up.

Siobhan was at the stove with her red-grey braid over one shoulder.

She did not say a word, and she wiped her hands slowly on a dish towel.

Amona sat at the foot of the table, seventy-nine, upright in her black wool dress.

The elders called her Nekane, and the rest of the pack called her Amona, which meant grandmother.

Joxe sat at the head.

Beside him, with a glass of wine in his thick fingers and a smile that did not reach his eyes, sat Gorka.

"Here he is," Gorka said. "The omega of the hour."

Fionn took the chair at the far end, next to the kitchen door, where the dogs usually lay.

It had been his place for three years.

Mikel came in behind him, showered, in a clean shirt, with his jaw shut hard.

He sat on his father's right, across from his uncle, and he did not look down the table at all.

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