Chapter 16: Five Days

Ansel's POV

For five days Freja sat at my right hand in Garrick Hall, and I said everything I was going to do before I did it.

I said it to her at breakfast, and I said it again at the Table with the elders watching.

"I'm going to open the north boundary reports now," I said. "Then I'm going to walk the east fence."

She would nod, and the pack would watch her nod.

By the second day they had stopped whispering.

By the fourth, a hunter who had once carried a deer carcass into her clinic brought her a bag of oranges and could not look her in the face.

I wanted to touch her all day.

I did not.

She had come back on her own, and Odessa had told me twice what a forced bond would do, and my father had watched his own brother walk into the sea.

The mark would have been easy.

One bite, one night, and she would have been mine in every way the pack could see.

She would never have been free of me, and I would never have known if she stayed because she wanted to.

So I said my plans out loud and kept my hands in my pockets.

The vow had gone loose since the Stone.

I felt it every day, a band round my throat that had stopped closing.

I did not test it.

I was afraid that if I said the word and it burned, I would lose the thing I had just gotten back.

On the fourth night I wrote two pages in the pack's council book, in front of the Table's clerk.

Nolan sat beside me and swore to what he had heard at twenty-one, through the thin wall of the old boathouse.

It was Cordelia, talking to her father, saying that I would never ask Freja now.

I read the page back to Freja the next morning, aloud, before I filed it.

I did not tell her about the other paper.

It was in the inside pocket of my coat, folded in four, and it said that if the pack chose any woman but her, I resigned as Alpha that same hour.

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