My Gown Had No Gems, So I Walked Out of My Own Bonding Ceremony novel · Chapter 20 of 32
Chapter 20: The Sewing Basket
My mother sent for us by name.
The note came to Ironwood before breakfast, in the upright hand I had read twenty-two times in a ledger.
Come to the morning room, both of you, it said. Alone. Tea at ten.
"Don't go," said Jasper.
"I have to."
"Then I'll wait at the gate."
"You'll wait at the gate," I agreed, and kissed him hard enough that his beta found something to do in the other room.
Cecily and I walked up the Lodge steps at ten.
The Council had lifted the ban on us for the day, and nobody on the staff met our eyes.
My mother sat in the small room off the kitchen, where she did her accounts.
A kettle sang on the stove, and a basket of mending sat at her elbow, the same wicker basket she had carried through every house I'd ever lived in.
She poured three cups and did not ask whether we wanted them.
"You look well," she said to me. "Marriage suits you."
"We're bonded, not married."
"The pack hasn't learned the difference."
"What do you want, Mama?"
"To talk plainly, for once." She folded her hands. "Your father is not a man who can bear a Council. Margot will be exiled or worse. If I do nothing, this pack will fall to the Council's appointee, a stranger with no tie to us, and everything your grandfather built will be sold off."
"That's the story you came with?"
"It's the truth." She looked at Cecily, and Cecily looked into her cup. "I can make this end tomorrow."
"How?"
"I will tell the Council that Margot acted alone. The stones, the letters, all of it. I will say she kept me in the dark, as she kept your father. They will believe me."
"Because you've already told them."
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