Chapter 17: Early

Conall's POV

I stood up off my knees, and my legs didn't want to hold me.

I went up the first step of the stone, not the second, and stopped there with my head level with my son's boots.

He didn't look at me.

He bent, picked the wooden wolf up off the rock where I had left it, and put it in his cloak pocket.

Then he said, "Not a hug."

"Not a hug," I said.

That was all.

Through the bond I felt Catriona breathe out, a long shaking breath that was almost a laugh.

I wasn't supposed to be listening.

I had told her that, and she had said, "Then stop," and I had tried.

It was trying to stop hearing a neighbor's radio through a wall.

I could turn my head away from it, and that was all I could do.

Before she left the ridge that night, Lorna had stopped at the tree line.

"Ask your elders what a banished mother is owed on Midwinter eve," she had said over her shoulder.

"They'll tell you. They always do."

I hadn't asked yet.

I told myself it was because the boy had just been named.

On Monday I stood at the edge of the school lot in Cutbank at ten past two.

The bell was at three-ten.

I had a flannel coat on, because I had decided that if I was going to be the man at the school gate, I was going to look like one.

Eleven mothers stood around me, and none of them knew what I was.

One of them offered me a coffee out of a thermos.

I took it.

I had never once stood in a crowd of humans waiting for my own child.

At two-forty, my phone lit up on the dashboard.

It was the Beta.

I picked it up.

"Alpha," he said low. "A grey wolf from the Eastern pack's on the east line. Third night running.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Last Time He Called Me Dad from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.