Chapter 10: Ten Daughters

Jasper's POV

I drove to Brennick Ridge with Mark's phone on the seat beside me and her taste still in my mouth.

I had left her asleep.

I had never left a woman asleep in my life, and I did not know how to feel about it.

I knew how to feel about the rest.

I had asked the Council for the long silver for a girl who had held my brother while he died.

I had sat in the gallery every day of her trial and hated the back of her head.

There was no word for what I was now, so I kept driving.

Brennick Ridge was a lodge town in the pines, and nobody stopped me at the gate.

The Alpha's study had a stone fireplace and a bearskin on the floor, and Stanton Brennick sat behind his desk with a glass of bourbon at noon.

He did not stand.

"Holloran. You're a long way from your valley."

"I came to show you something."

I put the phone on the blotter and pressed play.

Faye's voice came out of it, thin and wet.

*Mark, please. Please don't tell her about my blood. Let me tell her myself.*

I watched his face.

He did not look shocked.

He looked tired, and then his eyes went calculating.

"That's an old phone," he said.

"It's from the night of the Border Moon. Forty minutes before he died. Your daughter told the Council she was in the library."

"She was in the library."

"She called him from a clearing in the mountains, Brennick. The tower pinged it. I had it checked yesterday."

That was a lie.

I had not had it checked.

I had wanted to see what his face did.