The Apex They Could Never Own: A Werewolf Romance of Power, Possession, and Fate novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Families Walk In

"Let him go," I said.

My voice carried all the way up the Gathering Hall.

Corbin tightened his arm around Dad's chest, and the silver ring turned slowly against Dad's collar.

"Leash your hound, kiddo," he said, pleasantly. "He's frightening the guests."

"I don't have a leash."

I held my wrist up so the whole hall could see it.

"I gave it up. Not an hour ago, in your cellar, with my hand on his heart. Ansel Thackwell is nobody's."

A sound went through the benches, and nobody tried to hush it.

Ansel stepped up beside me.

He had silver burns on both hands and silver dust in his hair, and he stood straight.

"It's true," he said. "She could have kept me. She could have made me do anything. She said the words, and I'm free."

Corbin's face went white.

"Impossible," he said.

"It's not," a woman said from the back of the hall.

Hattie's mother had come up the kitchen stair behind us, with her arms full of three grey cuffs.

She walked up the aisle and set them down, one by one, on the Council table.

They rang on the wood.

"I went down the cellar," she said. "I looked for myself. I wanted to see where they keep the dead."

She turned to the hall.

"I had help, though."

The doors at the back swung open.

Hattie stood in them, with her hacked-off hair standing out in tufts and a hundred people behind her.

They were old and young, in church clothes and work clothes.

Some of them carried photographs.

"I knocked on a lot of doors this morning," Hattie called. "Everyone who ever lost somebody to a Hold, or an accident, or a tragic illness. Come on in."

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