My Sister Faked Blindness, So I Destroyed Them All novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What He Came to Take

Bram carried the belt out himself before he let me say another word.

He wrapped it in the towel, and then in a feed sack, and shut it in the iron box under the cabin steps.

When he came back in, he washed his hands at the basin for a long time.

"You smell like her," I said. "Like the wolfsbane."

"I know."

He dried his hands and did not turn around.

"I smelled that on my mother," he said.

I sat very still on the bed.

"I was fourteen. She cleaned the Alpha's grain stores, and a split sack of wolfsbane seed got into her cuts."

"Bram."

"The lower-farm clinic had no healer that night, so I ran to the big house and begged for the Alpha's Healer."

His broad back was shaking under the wet shirt.

"She told me to come back in the morning," he said. "I went three times. On the third, your father heard me at the gate, and he didn't even come down."

My throat closed.

"She died at dawn," he said. "I held her hand while her skin burned."

"I'm so sorry."

"That's not the end of it." He turned around, and his face was bare. "When your father's order came for a mate for you, I said yes before he finished the sentence."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted something of his," he said. "I thought I'd take his daughter's name and drag it through the same mud. I thought you'd be spoiled, and I'd make you pay for it."

The words hurt more than I expected.

For three weeks he had slept on a porch in the snow and bandaged my hand and never raised his voice.

He had come into this marriage to hurt me.

I felt the old, bitter flinch of someone about to be proven right.

Then I looked at his hands.

They hung open at his sides, and he was waiting for me to tell him to go.

"And now?" I asked.

"Now I'd walk into the river first," he said hoarsely. "I'd pull the whole house down on my own head before it touched you."

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