The Thirteenth Moon novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Old Lodge

Torin's POV

I waited until Brynn was asleep.

She had her back against my chest and her mother's quilt over both of us.

It took everything I had to slide out from under her arm.

Edda was in the kitchen with a lamp and the ledger.

She looked at my jacket and my boots and did not ask.

"If he catches you in that house, the stay won't cover you," she said.

"I know."

"He'll talk. He likes to talk. Let him."

She didn't look up from the book.

"And Torin, he'll use me. Don't let him."

I walked up the east trail in the dark.

The Old Lodge sits above the Alpha's house on its own shelf of rock.

Orrin moved there when he stepped back, and he kept every key he ever owned.

I had been in his study a hundred times as a boy.

I went around the back and put a shoulder to the kitchen door, where the frame was soft.

It opened the way it always had.

The study light was on.

Orrin sat behind his desk in a cardigan with a glass of whiskey, waiting for me.

"You were quicker than I thought," he said. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

"You always did." He gestured at the chair anyway. "Shut the door. The wind carries."

I shut it.

My phone was in my boot, recording.

I had pressed the button on the trail, and my pulse beat in my ears the whole time he looked me over.

"You have your proof," Orrin said pleasantly. "The girl has it on her arm."

"I came to hear it from you."

"Hear what?"

"Why I was run out of my own pack."

He smiled.

"Thirteen moons ago, my son's beta came to the lodge in the middle of the night, shaking."

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