Chapter 9: The Missing Page

Torin's POV

By four in the morning the boy's fever was gone and Thea was asleep sitting up, with her head against the bedpost and her hand on his ankle.

I did not move her.

I sat in the dark and counted what I knew.

Arlo was four years and eleven months old.

He was mine.

I had known it at the airport the moment the wind shifted, and I had spent three days pretending to be a man who didn't.

Five years of mornings I could not have, and every one of them was in this room.

At five-fifteen I got up and put the blanket over Thea's shoulders.

She didn't wake.

Her collar had slipped, and I saw the crescent scar on her skin.

I had made that mark myself, in the boathouse, with her back against the wall and her fingers in my hair.

I had entered it in my father's claims book before I left for Reykjavik, as my house requires.

I stood by the bed and looked at her sleeping face, and I was very afraid.

Not of her.

Of what I had believed for five years, and how easily I had believed it.

I left a note on the table saying I would be back at nine and not before, so the rule would stay unbroken.

I took the stairs.

The riverside house was dark when I let myself into my father's study.

The Alpha was asleep upstairs.

I did not wake him.

The ledgers were in the glass cabinet behind his desk, spines in a row.

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