Chapter 23: The Ring

The old stone cellar on the north road had a door as thick as a table.

Roz and I went down on the third morning as Alphas.

Devon and four of the patrol came behind us.

Our daughters were asleep at the cabin with the nurse.

Orson sat on a cot against the wall, in silver cuffs, with a blanket round his shoulders.

He had lost weight in three days.

He did not stand up.

"Alphas," he said. "I had hoped it would be the elder."

"The elder is ninety-one," Roz said. "She sends her regards."

"What do you want?"

"We came to tell you what happens," I said.

I had practiced it in the truck.

I found I didn't need to.

"The pack will not kill you. We do not do that here, and I won't have it said that I started."

"That's mercy, is it?"

"It's law."

He smiled.

"You will be taken to the border road tomorrow, with the clothes you stand in."

"You'll have no keys, no name in this valley, and no pack."

"Nobody on Silver Ridge will answer your call. Nobody will feed you, or hear you, or write to you."

"For how long?"

"Until you die."

I watched him take that in.

He was a man who had never once been alone.

"The pups," he said, and his voice cracked. "My granddaughters. Let me see them. Once. Let me hold one."

"No," Roz said.

"I'm their grandfather."

"You're the man who took them out of a hospital in a car seat," I said.

"You put them in a house with a woman who didn't love them."

"You told their fathers their mothers were liars. You had everything you needed to be a good man."

"I did it for the line."

"They are not a line," said Roz. "They're ours."

He looked at me then, with Conall's grey eyes, and for a moment he was only an old man.

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