The Alphas Broken Mate novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Valley

I had not seen my valley in eighteen years.

We came over the rim at dusk, and the whole slope lay open below us, green and gold in the last light.

I stopped my horse and could not make it go on.

The house was still there.

It was black stone with no roof, the chimney standing alone in a ring of nettles.

Caius brought his horse up beside mine.

"We can turn back," he said. "Bryony will not thank you for this."

"Osric said alone."

"Osric says many things."

"He kept his word to Merrick," I said. "He will keep it to us."

My voice came out cracked and sure, and he looked at me for a long moment.

"Forty riders are in the trees behind us," he said. "They come when I whistle. Not before."

"Not before," I said.

I rode down.

The grass was knee-high around the house.

Someone had cut a path through it, narrow and fresh, and I followed it to the door.

I got down on my own legs and walked in through the place where the door had been.

The floor was bare earth.

The big table was a pile of charred wood.

In the kitchen the bread oven still stood against the wall, iron-doored and rusted, and I knelt in front of it.

I put my hand on the cold iron.

I had been six when I folded myself into that space with my knees against my chest.

I had listened to my mother Call.

I remembered the sound of men dropping.

I remembered one man not dropping, and then the sound that came after.

I did not cry.

I opened the oven door and looked at the black hollow I had once fit inside.

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