Unmarked: My Mate Refused, The Alpha King Didn't novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Price

My father looked at me for a long moment.

Then he looked at the tiers, at two hundred wolves waiting to hear the number.

"Forty miles of river wall," he said. "The Stanmore gold paid for every stone of it."

"And what did that buy?" the presiding elder asked.

"A hundred fen families who don't drown every spring."

His voice was flat and tired.

"The price was my daughter," he said. "I'd pay it again."

A sound went through the hall, low and ugly.

I didn't move.

"You sold me to Stanmore," I said. "Then you paid the Keeper to say the Stone had picked him."

"You'd have been a king's plaything."

"I'd have been a king's mate."

"You'd have been mine to lose," my father said.

The Keeper dragged herself up off her knees.

She tore at her cloak hem with her thin fingers until the stitches gave, and a flat leather book fell out onto the floor.

"My ledger," she said. "Thirty years of readings, as the Stone gave them and as I called them."

Pippa picked it up and carried it to the elder's table.

The elder turned pages with one knotted finger, and her mouth got tighter at each one.

"Eleven false readings," she read. "Eleven, for gold, for land, for fear."

She stopped at one page, and her eyes lifted to me.

"Child, there is an older entry here under the name of Marrow."

"My mother," I said.

My throat closed on it.

"She read gold with another man," the Keeper whispered. "A boatman on the fen. Your father came to me the same way, with a ring. I called it for him."

I turned slowly.

My father's face had changed at last.

"She told me once the Stone felt like cold water," I said. "I thought she was making a joke."

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