The Alpha King's Heart novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Both Truths
I handed Toby to Selma and took the paper.
The King stepped back to give me the lamp over the door.
The ink had gone brown, and the hand was square and heavy.
It was a parley order, dated the night before the signing.
It named the east hall.
It said the doors would be barred at the second bell, with the delegation inside.
It listed thirty human delegates by rank and gave one instruction.
None of them was to leave Stonegate Hall alive.
At the bottom was a heavy signature and the silver crest of the wolf's head in thorns.
*Wycliffe.*
I read it once.
Then I sat down on the cold union hall steps, because my legs would not hold me.
"Your father signed this," I said.
"Yes."
"He planned to kill them all."
"I found it in his coat, in the rubble, on the second night."
"The delegates were right."
"They were."
"My father wasn't paranoid. He wasn't a murderer who got lucky."
"I don't know what he was," the King said quietly. "I know my father barred a door. And I know that the hall came down before the second bell finished."
I shut my eyes.
I saw my father's black hands, and the quarry on Saturdays, and a little girl holding a fuse wire.
He had pressed the trigger on thirty people already doomed, and on the wolves killing them, and on a Queen who had signed nothing.
It was true.
It was all true at once.
"How long have you carried this?" I said.
"Five years."
"You could have shown the council. They'd have understood why my father did it."
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