My Family Forgot I Existed, So I Left Them Behind novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: A Goat If It Came to It

I shut the link on my sister with a snap, and sat on the lodge steps with my head between my knees.

Odette had known where my mother would go, and what she would hold, and what I would say.

She had planned it three months ago, one lie at a time.

By afternoon I wanted to hit something, and I took the feed bucket out to the Brask kennels so I could do it quietly.

Two guards were mending a gate behind the shed.

They didn't see me, and I didn't mean to listen.

"He's the Alpha, he doesn't get a vote," the younger one said. "The bond picks. He told me himself, the day before she came. 'If the Moon sends her, I'll take her.' Any mate, anywhere."

"That's the old way."

"It's the only way. He'd have taken a goat if the link said goat."

The older man laughed.

I put the bucket down very carefully.

I had known it, I thought.

I had known it since the highway, when a man I'd never spoken to said *one yes, out loud,* as if he'd practised.

I had been a leftover the Moon handed him, and he had been kind about it.

I walked back to the lodge with my face on fire.

Torin was in the kitchen, with a cup of coffee going cold and a map of the border unrolled on the table.

He looked up, and whatever he saw made him put the coffee down.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Imogen."

"Your guards were talking." I stayed in the doorway. "They said you'd take whoever the bond gave you. A goat, if it came to it."

His jaw went tight.

"That was one of the kennel boys."

"Is it true?"

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