Chapter 14: Vera at the Gate

I did not open the gate.

Vera held the bars with both hands, and the rain ran off her chin.

"He said the healer will test it," she said.

"He said he'll prove it's another man's. Roxanne, there is no other man."

"I know," I said.

"You know?"

"You've never been able to lie to me about a man. You just did it about everything else."

She flinched.

I stood there with the umbrella the cook had pushed into my hand, and I didn't hold it over her.

"I held your hair at my mate's funeral," I said. "You held mine."

"Roxanne."

"Then you went home and brewed me a cup of poison for three years."

"I know what I did."

"No. You know what you got caught doing."

Her mouth shook.

"Warrick told me you'd never wake," Vera said. "He said it was kinder."

"Kinder."

"He said you'd keep grieving and never have to know you were missing anything. I told myself that every morning when I poured it."

"And the pup?"

"I wanted something that was mine." Her voice broke. "I wanted one thing that wasn't yours first."

I let that sit in the rain between us.

It was the plainest sentence she had said to me in three years, and it was the ugliest.

"Why are you here, Vera?"

"Because I have nowhere else." She wiped her face. "And because I can pay for the night."

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