Substitute Luna, Runaway With His Quadruplets novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What Gideon Held

Rhys's POV

I took Gideon past the goat shed, where Nora wouldn't have to hear him.

He didn't wait for me to ask.

"I knew," he said. "I was nine. I stood outside my grandmother's door and heard her crying that Dad had taken in another man's cub. I knew Nora wasn't a Thorne before I could spell the name."

"And you said nothing for twenty years."

"I told myself it didn't matter. She was my sister."

His breath smoked in the dark.

"The night after the elders read her charges, Priscilla came to my quarters. She said Nora's car would only stall on the logging road. A scare. Enough for the elders to see she was unfit."

"You believed her."

"No. I handed her my pliers anyway."

He held out his own hands and looked at them.

"I held the lamp while she cut. She didn't even flinch. She hummed. When she was done she gave me back the pliers and said, 'Wash them, brother.'"

My wolf made a low noise in my chest.

I put my hand on a fence post and made it stop.

"Four pups were in that car," I said.

"I didn't know that. Not until the clinic scan came up on her phone." He swallowed. "I'm not saying that makes me better."

"It doesn't."

"I know."

We stood there. A goat shifted in the shed.

There was one more thing I had to know, and I'd carried it for two years.

"Did Nora know she wasn't a Thorne?"

Gideon turned and stared at me.

"When she married me. Did she know my father's deal, and take the seat anyway?"

"Is that what you've been thinking?"

"My father only ever did things for a reason. I thought she'd been told."

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