My Pack Erased Me. The Lycan King Didn't. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not Sealed

Thora refuses her father's offer to hide in the attic until the treaty is signed, gets no look from her mother, accepts the King's thirty-day keeping, and reads the note her brother hands her.

The gravel on the drive cut my bare feet, and I let it.

Behind me the Gathering had started up again.

Someone had put music on.

I went around the side of the Pack House and up the back stairs to my room, because I wasn't leaving without my coat.

I had lived in that room for twenty-four years.

It took me four minutes to pack one bag.

Underwear, my grandmother's wool socks, the good boots, my phone charger, the photo of me at nine on Joss's shoulders.

I left the white dress on the bed.

When I came out onto the landing, my father was standing at the top of the stairs.

He had never once blocked my way before.

"Thora," he said. "Don't make this bigger than it is."

I looked at him.

"Stonefall will be gone by Monday," he said. "Stay in the attic until then. Nobody has to know you're still here. When the treaty is signed we'll talk to the Crown and sort out the writ."

"The Crown refused to seal it, Dad."

"The Crown can be talked to."

"You want me in the attic," I said. "Erased, in the attic, so Stonefall's Alpha doesn't have to see me when he signs."

"I want you safe."

"You stood three steps from me and didn't growl."

His jaw worked.

"It was a rejection before three hundred wolves," he said. "If I'd touched Brant it would have been war. I did what kept this pack alive."

"You kept it alive by throwing me out."

"I never said throw you out."

"You said strike it."

He reached for my arm.

I stepped back, and his hand closed on air.

The sound he made was small and surprised.

He had never been refused by a child of his before.

"I'm not staying in the attic," I said. "Move."

He moved.

Downstairs, in the narrow hall by the kitchen, my mother was drying a dish that was already dry.

Edda Haldane had been the pack healer for as long as I'd been alive.

She'd set my brothers' bones and sat up through my fevers, and she had never in her life been still for longer than a minute.

She was still now.

"Mom," I said.

She kept her eyes on the dish.

"Mom, look at me."

The towel moved in her hands, round and round.

I waited as long as I could stand it.

She never looked up.

I left through the kitchen door.

The King's car was parked at the end of the drive with the engine off.

It was black and ordinary and very clean, and two of his guards stood on either side of it, watching the dark, with their backs to me to give me room.

Caspian Lorne leaned against the passenger door with his jacket hooked on one finger.

Up close he was younger than I'd thought, around thirty-five, with a pale scar through his left eyebrow and eyes somewhere between grey and green.

He didn't smile.

"Thora Haldane," he said. "You're limping."

"I took off my shoes."

"I saw."

"Why did you refuse the seal?"

"I'll answer that tomorrow, when you can stand on both feet." He turned his jacket over in his hand. "Right now you have two choices. You can sleep in a motel, and at some point tonight your father will drive out and find you and ask you to come home quietly. Or you can accept a keeping."

"What's a keeping?"

"The Crown takes a named wolf under its roof. Thirty days. You get your own rooms, your own door and your own say in what happens to you. Nobody at Greywater can claim you, and nobody at Stonefall can come near you."

"What does it cost?"

"Terms," he said. "I'll give them to you at Highcrest. You can say no to any of them and walk out."

"And what do you get?"

"I haven't decided yet."

It was the first plain thing anyone had said to me all night.

The music from the lawn was still going, thin and cheerful across the grass.

I looked back at the house once.

My father stood at the upstairs window with his hand flat on the glass, and he was not looking at me, he was looking at his own hand.

"Okay," I said. "Thirty days."

The King opened the back door and held it, and he didn't touch me.

I had one foot in the car when someone jogged up behind me, heavy and out of breath.

It was Joss.

His eyes were red, and he didn't say sorry, he didn't say anything.

He pushed a square of folded paper into my hand and closed my fingers over it.

"Mom said give you this," he said. "Don't read it until you're far."

Then he stepped back, and the guard shut the door.

I unfolded the paper under the dome light before we'd cleared the gate, because I had never been good at waiting.

It was my mother's handwriting, small and fast.

It said: "It was never you who was empty."

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