Chapter 24: Given

I asked to do it in the clinic hallway.

Nobody understood, and Dane didn't ask why. He just said, "Where you like."

The pack followed us down the hill in the thin gold light.

They crowded into the corridor I had walked down every morning for four years, and the hall was too small for them.

The door of room six stood half open. It had never latched.

I stopped at the spot on the linoleum where Colt had stood.

"This is where he gave me away," I said, to nobody and everybody.

Carrie was at the back with her arms crossed, and her eyes were wet.

"I was twenty-four then. I lay on a pillow and kept my mouth shut, because nobody would have believed me."

The eldest elder had followed us on her cane, and nobody had dared stop her.

"It's a new day," she said. "State your age, child."

"Twenty-five," I said. "As of this morning."

"State your guardian."

"You, ma'am. And I'm releasing you from it, with thanks."

She actually smiled.

"Released," she said. "And ward of nobody."

"Then I'm saying this myself."

I turned and looked at Dane.

He stood in the corridor with his ribs bound under his shirt.

It was the same hall where he had said a single word and taken me home.

He looked at me and did not blink.

"I, Nan Thackeray," I said, "am not wolfless. I never was."

My voice carried down the corridor.

"I give myself into the Alpha's house. Not because anyone gave me. Because I'm choosing it."

"Nan," Dane said, low.

"I'm choosing his bed, and his pack, and his name. I'm choosing the mess."

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