Wolfless Omega, Claimed by Prince Lycan King novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Paid

"Lived through what?" I said.

The old healer's eyes went past my shoulder.

Evander was crossing the hall toward us in his borrowed coat, and the Court was parting for him.

Her fingers let go of my wrist all at once.

"Not here," she breathed. "Not with him in the room. I'm too old to be hanged."

"Hanged for what?"

She pulled her shawls up to her chin and turned her face to the fire.

"Ask your father what he was paid," she said. "Then leave an old woman alone."

A young attendant came and wheeled her chair away.

She didn't look back at me once.

Evander reached me a second later.

"What did she say to you?"

I looked at the scar on my own chest, then at the long coat hiding his.

"She said I lived."

He frowned. "She's eighty. She thinks it's still the old King's reign half the time."

"Then why did she look at me like she'd seen a ghost?"

He didn't have an answer.

Oona found it in under an hour.

The Court kept a roll of every Council seat ever granted, in a leather book the size of a gravestone in the library.

She ran her finger down the page and stopped.

"Halvard Moreland. Seat eleven." She read the date out loud, then read it again. "That's the week after your graduation."

"Exactly a week?"

"Seven days." She tapped the line beside it. "'For service to the Crown.' That's all it says. That's what they write when they don't want to write what."

I stared at the old brown ink.

My father had brought me home with a fever and a scar.

Seven days later he was sitting at the King's table.

I found him in the Council antechamber at four o'clock, where the elders took their brandy before dinner.

Lyla was with him, perched on the arm of his chair. Her eyes were red. She'd been crying in a bathroom somewhere, and she wanted everyone to know.

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