Chapter 15: What He Gave Up

Torben's POV

My beta had sent for them herself, from the porch, on the radio, the night we crossed the pass.

She told me so while the first truck was still pulling into the yard.

"You'd have waited till the Moot, and by then Castelnaud would have got to them one at a time," she said. "Now they can look at her first."

I had meant to be angry about that and couldn't find the place.

By noon the lodge held three Alphas.

An old woman who had run the river pack for forty years sat by my stove with her boots on my fender.

A tall man from the north fork stood at the window with his arms crossed.

The youngest ran the orchard pack and had never been in a fight he didn't enjoy.

He ate three of my beta's biscuits and said nothing at all.

They had watched Margo walk through the main room with Maisy, and none of them had asked her for a word.

They had looked at her bare wrist, though, every one of them.

Heath Castelnaud drove up at four with a white flag on his antenna and his Beta in the passenger seat.

He came up the steps slowly, with a leather case in one hand.

"Alpha Roake," he said. "A word, between us. Before the Moot makes fools of us both."

"Say it here."

"I'd rather it was private. For your people's sake."

That was a good line, and I nearly walked out to him for it.

I took him to the far end of the porch, where the three Alphas could see me through the glass and not hear.

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