My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Sixty-One Years
Roderick's POV
Ona Sundquist would not come into the house until I walked down and opened the gate myself.
She sat in the older board man's truck at the cattle guard with her roll of irons in her lap.
He took off his hat when I reached the window.
"She wouldn't let me bring her anywhere else," he said.
"Come up," I said.
Marit met us on the porch in her father's flannel shirt with her hair down.
She took Ona's arm up the steps without being asked.
We sat in the kitchen at two in the morning with the cherry oilcloth between us and a pot of coffee going.
The old woman held her cup in both stiff hands.
"I was twenty in 1962," Ona said. "I was at that Rendezvous."
I put down my cup.
"Your grandfather asked Einar's aunt to dance. They had been meeting in a hay field for a month.
"When he took her hand, the silver came up on both their wrists in front of the hall, as it did on Marit's tonight."
"Nobody told me that part," I said.
"The board met in the parking lot that same night. They were afraid.
"It was a thing they could not choose and could not hold. A man's ditch can't depend on what his daughter's wrist decides.
"So the chairman called it a sickness, and he called it yours."
"And the girl?" I said.
"She wasn't sick. Her father paid for a bed in Casper so she would stop saying what she'd seen.
"She came out thirty years later, well, and she never forgave her brother."
My throat had gone tight.
My father had told me I carried a rot.
My grandfather had said nothing, because he had learned to keep his mouth shut or lose the other leg.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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