My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: On Foot

Ned's POV

I woke at four, and the bed was cold on her side.

I knew before I opened my eyes.

The pull in my chest had gone slack, like a line cut at the far end.

I lay there one breath.

Then I was up and into my trousers and down the stairs in my bare feet.

The housekeeper stood in the kitchen with the lamp lit and her arms folded.

She did not ask what I wanted.

"The Honda's gone," she said. "She took her father's coat."

"Which way?"

"Left at the gate. It's snowing."

I took my boots from the porch, where the boy was waking, and I took my coat from the hook.

I did not take the truck keys.

I stood in the yard and looked at them in my hand.

The truck was in the shed.

It would have taken me down the mountain in ten minutes.

I put the keys back on the hook.

I could not have said why.

I knew only that a man who drives down a mountain after a woman who has walked out on him is a man taking something, and that I had spent ten weeks taking, and she had written it on a note in front of three hundred people.

*She leaves when she likes.*

I had read it.

I had said yes in my head, and I had not understood what I was saying.

I went out the gate on foot.

The snow came down thick and fine, and it was black dark.

My wolf was up and pacing inside me, all the way to the surface of my skin.

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