My Mate and Family's Choice novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Mother's Cup
The note said come alone, so I took my mate to the door and made him wait outside it.
"Term two," I said. "I'm telling you before I go in."
"I'll be ten feet away."
"You'll be ten feet away with your hands in your pockets."
He put them in his pockets.
I would have liked to kiss him for it, but there were Council clerks in the hallway, and I had Dalton's mother to meet.
The anteroom was a plain room with a long oak desk and two clerks writing in ledgers.
They looked up when I came in, and neither of them looked down again.
Dalton's mother sat by the window in a grey wool suit with a silver tray on her knees.
On the tray stood a china cup of cider, steaming.
The smell of cloves reached me from across the room, and my wolf stirred without growling.
She only wrinkled her nose.
I'd thought the smell would still scare me.
It only smelled like something that had been done to me.
"Tegan, dear," Mrs. Henshaw said. "Sit. You're white as the dress you didn't wear."
"I'll stand."
"As you like."
She smoothed her skirt.
"My son has done a terrible, stupid thing, and I won't pretend otherwise. A mother knows her child."
I said nothing.
"But a terrible thing done to one girl shouldn't cost three hundred families their Alpha. The Henshaw pack will fall apart without him. The Council will pick over our land like crows."
"So."
"So you will tell the Council tomorrow that you went up that mountain of your own free will. That the MacAlister healer's herbs confused you at the Rite. That the thread was a mistake of your own nerves."
"And?"
"And the writ against your MacAlister Alpha is withdrawn. Dalton goes home to Henshaw Hall, under watch, and never troubles you again." Her smile was thin and neat. "The Henshaw pack pays the Haskins pasture in full and the MacAlister debt twice over. Everyone goes home."
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