My Mate Broke Our Bond, So the Northern Alpha Claimed Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Vote
Her father carried Brogan to a spare room and laid him on the narrow bed.
Sorcha stood in the doorway and did not go in.
The healer from Blackmere's riders cut the bloody rag off his thigh and hissed through her teeth.
"He rode here with this?" she said. "With the lines this high?"
"He did," Sorcha said.
"He should be dead."
"He's stubborn."
The healer looked at her for a long moment, then went back to her work.
Sorcha slept sitting up in a chair in the hall corridor, with her head against the wall and her mouth open.
When she woke, gray light was coming through the windows, and her light was back, a small steady flame in her chest.
She went to the sickroom door.
Brogan lay on his side with his bare hand open on the quilt.
She looked at the black lines on his palm. She did not touch them.
She remembered his mouth on the inside of her knee, and she turned around fast and walked away.
At midmorning the bell rang for the council.
Ironwood's meeting hall was the same stone room where Corbin had called the bond a mistake. Sorcha stood in the back with her parents and the six black cloaks.
She had not meant to come in.
But the old warriors who had loved her father were packed along the walls.
When they saw her, one by one they put a fist over their hearts.
The Alpha sat at the head table.
He had been carried home from the Moot a week ago, and his hair had gone gray in that time. His hands shook on the wood.
Margaret sat on his right.
Corbin sat on the bench at the end with his head down. Beside him, the Beta, white as paper, held his hat in both hands.
"We have no wards," the Alpha said. "We have eleven dead and sixty wounded."
"We have no seed, because the fields were burned. Half our stores rotted when the stone cracked."
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