My Mate Rejected Me as Wolfless, Then My White Wolf Woke novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Bait

My grandfather lay propped against the pillows with his eyes open.

The color was back in his face.

It was not much, a pink patch on each cheekbone, but it was there, and I knew then he had been saving it.

"Close the door, little wolf," he said.

I closed it.

I didn't sit.

"The envoy told me you wrote to the Council in June."

"Did he."

"He wouldn't tell me why."

"Because it's mine to tell." He looked at the ceiling. "I've been trying to find the words for four months. I thought I would have them by now."

"Say it plain."

"All right." He turned his head to me. "I called you home to be rejected."

The room was very quiet.

It hit me low in the stomach, the way a thing does when you have been walking toward it for days.

"Rafe's father killed your mother," my grandfather said. "He did it with a mark and a rejection, the way his own father did it to my mother, and his grandfather before that. They have done it to every Hartwell woman who wore a Kingsley mark. I knew it. I couldn't prove it."

"You could have told someone."

"I told the Council. They sent a man who looked at Rafe's father and went home." He swallowed. "A rumor is worth nothing. A rejection in front of the Council's own eyes, with a Hartwell woman still alive after it, is worth everything."

"A Hartwell woman still alive."

"Yes."

"You said you didn't know if I would be."

"I did not know."

I took a step toward the bed.

"Did you know I had a wolf?"

"I suspected it. Your mother had one. It slept under a Kingsley mark for twenty years, and when the mark broke, it was too late for her. But yours was not yet old. Yours was white. I saw it in your eyes on your twelfth birthday. I never spoke of it, because I knew Rafe would take it if he guessed."

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