Chapter 20: The Ring

Bram's POV

The charter hung behind the black chair, and I had walked past it for ten years without reading it.

It was a long scroll of hide, framed in oak, with eight names inked down the left side in eight different hands.

Down the right side, in a ninth hand, were the words every Alpha swore to at his own seating.

I read it standing at the front of the hall at first light, with my coat folded on a bench and my hands bare.

*We hold by the Larkin, and what the Larkin gives we keep, and what the Larkin withholds we do without.*

I had said those words at twenty-three.

I had said them to Emmett Crane's face and not to hers.

Ashmoor had come in the night to fill the benches.

Nobody had called them.

They sat shoulder to shoulder in the dim hall, the whole pack, enforcers and kitchen hands and children asleep on their mothers' laps.

I had not told them what I meant to do.

They knew anyway.

Wynne came in through the side door at sunrise.

Maeve walked at her elbow, and her arm was bandaged under the sleeve of the green cloak.

She had her eyes down, and then she saw the benches, and she stopped.

"What is this?" she asked.

"This is Ashmoor," I said. "I asked them here."

"Why?"

"Because they were there for the ten years. They're owed the same thing you are."

I walked to the middle of the hall.

I took the ring off my right hand.

It was the Alpha's ring, heavy red gold, with the Ashmoor leaf cut into the bezel.

It had been my father's, and his father's before him.

I held it up where everyone could see.

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