I Saw My Alpha Mate's Betrayal, So I Changed Fate novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: Why No

The grove didn't know what to do with that.

Two hundred wolves had just stood up against an Alpha, and the man they'd stood up for had turned the chair down flat.

The eldest elder only nodded.

"Then the elders will sit until the pack chooses," she said. "Go home, all of you. It's late, and I'm old."

Abel didn't explain himself to anyone.

He walked out of the ring and stopped in front of me.

"Can we go home?" he said.

Home.

He'd never called it that out loud.

We drove up the ridge road behind the crew's truck, with the sisters hanging out the windows howling at the moon.

At the top, the cook made cocoa for everybody.

She put a candle in the middle of the plank table, because she said a night like that needed a candle.

The trapper said three whole sentences in a row.

Sophie drank half a bottle of the cook's blackberry wine and cried on Abel's shoulder for ten minutes about eight years.

He let her.

Then she fell asleep in the trapper's second chair, and the cook tucked a quilt over her.

When the camp went quiet, Abel and I climbed the stairs.

We didn't go in.

We stood on the catwalk with our elbows on the rail.

The full moon sat right over the valley, so bright the river looked like tin.

Down at the head of it, the burned cedars were a black ring.

"You're going to ask me," he said.

"I'm going to ask you."

"Go on, then."

"Why no?"

He was quiet a while.

"Because for eight years, I was the pack's story," he said. "The exile on the ridge. The one mothers pulled their pups away from."

"Tonight they stood up for me. I'm grateful. I'll be grateful till I die."

"But I don't want to be their story in a different chair."

He turned his cap around in his hands.

"I want this."

"The ridge?"

"The ridge. The crew. Sophie losing at cards. The cook yelling at me about the roof pitch."

"The weather board. The stool. Your gran's clock that runs four minutes slow and I never fix."

He looked at me.

"And you. That's the list."

"I'm on the end of it."

"I saved the best for last. You're supposed to do that with lists."

I laughed, and my eyes stung, and I didn't bother hiding either.

"Your turn," he said.

"My turn what?"

"What you want. You've never said."

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

Nobody had ever asked me.

Six years with Damien, and nobody had once asked. They'd told me what I was getting, and I'd said thank you.

"I want the ridge," I said slowly. "In my name. My real name."

"I want the job. I'm good at it. The captain checks my pictures before the weather."

"I want the camera. I want to be what Gran was, and I want to be it on purpose."

"And?"

"And I want to be asked. Every time. Not handed over. Not decided about."

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