The Luna He Lost to the Alpha King novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cedar Chest

After a boat ride with the Alpha King, Cora goes back to Pack House on her last day as Luna, finds Felicity in her robe and Jasper in Hazel's boots, carries out only her grandmother's cedar chest, and finds the King's car at the gate offering a house with no strings.

"Your wake is crooked," the Alpha King told my daughter.

"That's the lake's fault," Hazel said, without turning her head.

She was standing on a stool at the wheel of the Crown launch with both hands locked on the spokes and her tongue between her teeth.

Torin Halvorsen stood behind her with his arms folded and his eyes on the water, and he had not touched the wheel once.

He had stepped off the pier with a cake box and said only, "I heard there was a boat and nobody to put in it."

I should have said no.

I had a long list of reasons, and the best of them was that I didn't know him.

But Hazel had looked at the launch, then at the empty dock where her father had been, and then at me.

So I said yes to the boat. Only the boat.

"The baker wrote Congratulations," Torin said, setting the cake on the stern table. "I didn't tell him what for. I figured a birthday counts."

Hazel pulled the lid off and studied the blue icing.

"It's fine," she said. "I've been congratulated for less."

His mouth twitched.

It was the first time I saw him almost smile, and I looked at the lake so I wouldn't think about it.

He kept his distance from me the whole afternoon.

He asked about her inhaler once, plainly, and listened to the answer.

He let her steer us across the middle of Lake Aldous and back, and when she coughed on the cold wind he handed her his scarf without comment.

When we docked he said only, "Happy birthday, Hazel Mercer," and stepped aside.

He didn't ask me for anything.

I noticed that, too.

At four o'clock I drove up to the Redfern Pack House for the rest of our life.

A refused Luna has seven days to leave the Luna suite.

Today was the seventh.

The front door stood open, and Jasper was sitting on the top step in a pair of yellow rain boots.

They were Hazel's old ones, the ones with the frogs on the toes.

He grinned at us and showed me the gap in his teeth. "Look! Aunt Felicity says they're mine now."

Hazel stopped on the gravel.

I put my hand on her shoulder. "Stay with me."

Inside, the hall smelled like lemon polish.

Two of the pack elders stood by the stairs with their hands folded, and neither one could look me in the face.

Felicity came down the staircase with a stack of folded towels in her arms.

She was wearing my robe.

It was the green one, with the stitched hem, the one Declan had bought me the winter Hazel was born.

"Cora, thank goodness," she said, and her eyes filled. "I've been trying to pack for you, I didn't want it to be hard. Declan said you'd need a hand. Jasper spilled cocoa on my clothes, and this was the only thing warm, I'm so sorry, I'll wash it."

She meant every word, or she sounded like she did.

I looked at the robe, and I looked at the elders, and I made a decision about how this would go.

"Keep it," I said. "It'll fit you."

Her smile faltered, only a flicker.

Then I walked past her up the stairs, and she followed with the towels, saying, "Let me carry something, please, I want to help."

I took Hazel's clothes. Her books. The nightlight in the shape of a moon.

I did not take the sheets, the plates, the framed photographs or the wedding quilt.

I did take the cedar chest at the foot of our bed, the one my grandmother had carried across the mountains, and I took it with both arms, and I refused help with it.

It was heavy and it smelled of home.

At the top of the stairs Declan was waiting.

He must have come straight from Jasper's school. He still had a paper sticker on his shirt that said VISITOR.

His hand shook against the banister, and he'd stopped trying to hide it.

"Cora."

"Move, please."

"Where will you go?" He tried to touch my arm and stopped an inch away. "Tell me where. I'll fix this. I promise, I'll fix it."

"Somewhere you can't call an emergency."

Behind me I heard the soft rustle of a robe.

Felicity stood at the bottom of the stairs with the towels pressed against her chest, looking up at him.

He didn't turn his head.

He didn't need to. I watched his hand go to his collar.

I carried the chest down past him, one step at a time, in front of every elder in the hall.

At the door, Felicity touched my sleeve.

Her fingers were gentle.

"Don't be too hard on him," she said, very quietly, and her eyes were wet. "He's only ever gone where he owes."

I didn't ask what she meant.

I was too angry to ask.

I loaded the chest into the trunk, buckled Hazel in, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.

I had a motel room booked forty minutes away, and an inhaler with eleven doses left.

At the gate, a long black car was waiting with its engine off.

The window slid down, and the Alpha King looked at me across the gravel.

"I have a house with a lot of empty rooms," Torin said. "And no strings. You can say no."

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