He Left My Rejection on His Desk, So I Signed It Myself novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

Corwin stops Tilda at the gate with her father's confession and the nine weeks she kept it, grabs her wrist as the cut bond burns, and sends her north, where Hetta waits with a sealed page.

My mare stopped dead under his hand.

The bond was cut, but ten years of habit still told my body to lean toward him, and I hated it.

"Let go of the bridle, Corwin."

"Not yet."

His voice was low and steady, and it was worse than shouting.

"Your father wrote that he lit the fire at Kestrel lodge," he said. "He wrote it in his own hand, to you, from his deathbed."

"I know what he wrote."

"My mother was in the east room when it burned. My father went in after her and the roof came down on both of them."

I had no answer to that.

I had read those lines forty times and still had none.

"I was going to tell you tonight," I said. "I had it all ready. I was going to tell you after the toast."

"You were going to tell me tonight."

He said it flatly, to test how it sounded.

"The letter came nine weeks ago, Tilda. Nine weeks you sat across from me at supper. Nine weeks you slept in my bed."

"I didn't know how to say it."

"You knew how to say good morning."

That one landed, because it was fair.

I could have told him about the winter nights I lay awake rehearsing, the drafts I burned in the kitchen stove, the way I decided each morning to wait one more day.

None of that would matter to a man whose mother burned.

"You could have told me this afternoon," I said. "You could have said it to my face. You wrote it on a black-bordered sheet and left it on your desk with the wax still wet."

He didn't answer.

A muscle moved in his jaw, and he looked past my shoulder at the dark road.

"You wanted me to find it," I said. "You wanted me to sign and spare you the scene."

"I wanted," he said, and then he stopped.

I waited.

He said nothing more.

"Fine," I said. "Then it's done. Both names. Move your hand."

"The letter ends in the middle of a line," he said instead.

"There's a last page. It never came."

"Convenient."

"It's not convenient. It's why I kept waiting. Half a confession told me nothing, and I wanted the other half before I put it in front of you."

"Or you know exactly what it says."

"If I knew, I would have burned the first two pages."

"Would you?"

"Your father gave me you one year after that fire," he said. "A peace match, he called it. Was that his apology, Tilda? Did you know what you were paying for?"

"I was nineteen. I knew I was marrying the Alpha of Kestrel Ridge, and that you were kind to me on the first day."

"I was never kind."

"You carried my bags up four flights of stairs and did not say a word about it."

For a moment his face went open, and then it shut again.

I looked down at him from the saddle and thought about how much I had loved the sound of his boots in the hall.

"I'm done being asked that," I said. "Let go."

He did not let go.

I leaned down to pull the bridle from his fist, and he caught my wrist instead.

It was a bare grip, nothing worse.

But the cut bond lit up under his thumb and hurt all the way to my teeth.

I gasped, and so did he.

His hand clamped down hard and then jerked open.

For one breath we stared at each other with the pain still crossing back and forth between us.

His eyes were wet and furious, and he wiped them with the back of his wrist before I could name it.

"Take the north road," he said. "Go to the Fen, or the sea, or wherever your father's people hide."

"Gladly."

"If you set one foot on Kestrel land again, my wolves will take you to the border in chains. I'll order it tonight."

"Order it," I said. "You're good at orders."

I kicked the mare and she bolted past him.

He did not shout after me.

I rode two days and a night with the cut bond aching in my chest, and I slept in the saddle and drank from streams.

My wolf ran inside me the whole way, grey and silent and sore.

On the second dawn the marsh opened under a white sky, and there was the Fen, a ring of low black roofs standing in the reeds.

My father's hall was a shell.

The only smoke came from the cookhouse, where one stout old woman stood in the doorway with her arms folded.

"Hetta," I said.

She looked at the empty road behind me and at the dress I was still wearing, and did not ask one question.

"Come inside and eat," Hetta said. "Then I'll tell you why Doran's letter stopped in the middle."

I stared at her.

"The third page is sewn in my skirt," she said. "He swore me to give it to you in front of the Moot at Black Water, and the Moot sits in twelve days."

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