Chapter 23: I'll Want It Back

The old bell on the Pinebrook pack house steps rang again at noon.

Two hundred wolves stood on the lawn where I had once stepped out of a crowd.

The envoy had come down from the Keep to sit at a table on the steps.

Beside her sat Garrick, in a clean jacket, with the scar across his scalp turned toward the pack.

The pack had chosen him as Alpha the night before, with nobody standing against him.

I stood at the bottom of the steps with Torin on my right and my mother on my left.

Eli stood between us, holding the Pinebrook ledger in both arms.

Two Crown guards brought Theron up the lawn in chains.

He walked with his back straight and his good wool coat buttoned.

He looked at the pack as if he were still deciding whether to forgive them.

"Theron Stroud," the envoy said. "You are charged before your own people."

She read it out.

It took a while.

The women with old blood in their veins, a line for each, with the Alpha's note beside it.

The scent coil.

The unopened drawer of parcels.

When she was finished, nobody on the lawn made a sound.

"The Council has found you guilty on every count," the envoy said.

"You are stripped of your name in this pack and exiled from every pack under the Crown. No Alpha will take you in."

Theron said nothing.

He looked at me once, over the heads of the guards.

"You were the easiest girl in the pack to send," he said, clearly. "You had no one to ask where you'd gone."

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