Chapter 31: The Open Window

The matron sat on the stone wall by the academy gate.

A cane lay across her knees and a tin box sat in her lap.

She was smaller than I remembered.

She had worn a grey cardigan for as long as I had known her, and she was wearing it now.

"You grew," she said.

"I was eighteen two weeks ago."

"I know, I counted." Her mouth shook. "Sit down, child. I'm too old to shout it."

I sat on the wall.

Bram stayed three paces away on the road, because I had asked him to.

"Lucan paid for the window," I said. "He told me to ask you."

"He did." She nodded slowly.

"He paid for the window, and the crest, and the roof, and my silence."

"And I took his money for eleven years."

I waited.

"I didn't know what you were at first," she said.

"I only knew a man came to my door with a seven-year-old girl who smelled of smoke."

"He said she'd be kept, and I'd be paid."

"You took me out of the cellar."

"Your father put me in his debt years before. He sat up with my husband when he died."

She wiped her eyes.

"When I heard what the Alpha had done to that house, I ran up the hill in my slippers."

Her hands shook on the tin.

"I took you out of the cellar because I had promised him.

"Then Lucan found us in the valley. I could not hide a dragon child from an Alpha.

"So I made a bargain to keep you alive."

"By keeping me under the crest."

"By keeping you in a house with an open window, where you could breathe."

She laughed, a thin, awful sound.

"I told you it was good circulation. I never knew how to give you a coat. They said no coat."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Fae Asked If I Was Human, Now the Alpha Wants the Truth from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.