Chapter 15: The Chain

By midnight the rogues were dead, the wounded were in the infirmary, and Grimjaw's gate had been rebarred from the inside.

My pack stood in the courtyard and did not know what to do with its hands.

Nobody apologized yet.

I did not want them to, not in a crowd, not tonight.

I took the stairs to the top floor of the Alpha house, to the room at the end that had been my father's.

Dane had never slept in it.

He had taken the bigger room downstairs, and I had never asked why.

The door still smelled of pipe smoke and cedar.

I stood in the dark and let it hit me, and then I heard boots on the stairs behind me.

Jonah stopped in the doorway.

He had a blood-stiff shirt on and a gash across his forearm that had already stopped bleeding.

In his left hand he held the silver chain.

"I found it in the truck," he said.

"Why did you bring it up here?"

"Because it's yours to decide."

He held it out across his palm.

The links were still dull from my skin.

I had hated the sight of that chain for six days.

I took it from him and carried it to the window.

Below, the torches burned over the broken gate.

I dropped the chain out over the sill and heard it land in the dirt.

"Tomorrow they melt it," I said. "It's not coming back in this house."

"Good."

I turned around.

"You dragged me through that gate," I said.

He didn't move.

"You walked me down the middle of four hundred people who were throwing stones. You held the end of the chain, and you didn't look back once."

"I know."

"A rock hit me in the back of the head. I remember your hand didn't even tighten."

"It did," Jonah said. "I held on so I wouldn't turn around."

"Why?"

"If I'd turned around, I'd have seen your face, and I'd have stopped believing you had done it."

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