My Family Forgot I Existed, So I Left Them Behind novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Brask Ridge

Fenna finds her bond was broken from the inside, her wolf stays silent, the stone warms near Torin, and Odette is at the gate.

The Brask Ridge lodge sat at the end of a gravel road, a long timber hall with every window lit.

Torin drove through the gate without slowing, and two men on the porch lifted their hands to him.

Neither of them stared at me.

I was grateful for that.

*One child, Odette.*

I had read that notice until the words stopped being words.

My father had signed it the morning after I walked out, before anyone could have known whether I was coming back.

"He didn't wait a day," I said.

Torin cut the engine and looked at me.

"No," he said. "He didn't."

"Then it wasn't a mistake. He meant it."

"He meant it enough to put it on Council paper." His hand stayed on the wheel. "That's a paper he can't quietly take back, Imogen."

I wasn't sure whether that was a comfort.

"Kitchen first," Torin said. "Fenna will have been up since the video."

Fenna was at the stove in a flannel shirt and wool socks, with reading glasses pushed up into a grey braid.

She looked at me once, from my boots to my face.

"Sit," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're blue. Sit."

I sat.

A bowl of beef stew landed in front of me before I'd finished lowering myself onto the stool.

"Eat that, and don't talk until it's gone," Fenna said. "He'll want to ask you things. He can wait."

"I did not say a word," Torin said.

"You were about to. You have the face."

She turned back to the stove, and I heard Torin breathe out through his nose.

The stew was the first hot food I'd had in two days.

I ate all of it.

When I looked up there were three people in the doorway pretending to look for coffee filters.

Fenna shooed them off with a wooden spoon.

"The Harlan girl is eating," she told the hall. "Nobody is to say a word about it."

"Which Harlan girl?" a young voice asked.

"The one who walked out on her father on camera," Fenna said. "Go to bed."

I put down the spoon.

"Everyone has seen it."

"Four hundred people saw it live," Fenna said. "Two hundred thousand have seen it since. Your sister took the post down an hour ago, but nothing leaves the internet."

My stomach turned over.

Torin had gone still beside the counter.

"She took it down?"

"At eleven." Fenna pushed a mug of tea at me. "Drink. Then I look at your hands."

My hands were scraped raw from the gravel, and a long cut ran across my left palm that I didn't remember getting.

Fenna cleaned it with something that stung.

"This isn't from the road," she said.

"I held something. A while ago."

"How long?"

"Three months."

She turned my palm toward the light.

The cut was thin and white, almost healed, and it wept a little at the edges.

"A cut that's three months old should be a scar," she said. "This one's a week old. It keeps reopening."

I didn't answer.

In my coat pocket, against my hip, the stone chip was warm.

"Imogen," Fenna said. "When did your wolf last speak to you?"

"She's never really spoken. I'm twenty-four. I'm a late bloomer."

"That's what they told you?"

"That's what the doctor said."

"The doctor was wrong, or lying." Fenna took off her glasses. "I've done this work for forty years. Your link to the Harlan pack wasn't cut by anyone out there. A pack can release you, or throw you out, and either one leaves a scar on the bond where it was torn. Yours has no scar."

"What does that mean?"

"It means it came off from the inside." She said it slowly. "Something in you closed it. Or something you did."

The kitchen went quiet.

Torin crossed the floor and stood at my shoulder, not touching me.

"I haven't done anything," I said.

"Nobody said you had."

"I stood in front of my family and told them my name."

"You did," Torin said. "You were magnificent."

My face went hot.

"I was freezing, and I looked like a drowned cat."

"You were magnificent and freezing."

Fenna snorted.

I felt something that was almost a laugh work its way up my chest.

Then Torin stepped closer to check the window, and the stone in my pocket pulsed.

It pulsed against my hip, once, hot enough that I jumped.

"What?" Torin asked.

"Nothing." I put my hand over my pocket. "Cramp."

He looked at my hand.

He did not ask, and I was surprised by how much that mattered.

A knock came at the kitchen door.

One of the porch men put his head in.

His face was careful.

"Alpha," he said. "There's a car at the gate."

"Who?"

"A young woman, alone. Blonde, in a silver dress and no coat." The man swallowed. "She says she's Odette Harlan, and she's come to bring her sister home."

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