Chapter 9: Torin's POV: Kneel

Torin's POV

I woke before dawn with Hedda asleep on my chest, and I did not move for a long time.

Her hair was across my mouth.

It smelled of rain and woodsmoke, and I would have gone on lying there until the roof fell in.

Below us, the hall was breathing.

I had grown up in that hall.

I knew every cough and snore of every wolf who slept in it.

This was not that.

A hundred wolves, mine and hers, lay on the floor in their blankets.

Every one of them drew breath at the same moment she did.

When she sighed in her sleep, the whole hall sighed.

I had seen it start at the gate yesterday.

Forty Saltclaw wolves walked through with their eyes down and touched their chests as they passed her.

My wolf had pushed at my ribs then.

It had wanted me to go down on one knee in the dust.

I had stood there with my hand on her back, refusing.

I am Alpha of the Greyhowl Ridge.

I do not kneel to anyone, and I did not understand why my knees ached.

I slid out from under her as carefully as I could and pulled on my trousers.

She frowned in her sleep and reached for the warm place I had left.

I stood by the bed with my heart in my throat.

Then I went downstairs and out the side door, and unlocked the archive.

The Ridge's archive is a stone room under the Elder Den.

It holds a lamp, a table and nine hundred years of ledgers.

Nobody had been in it since my father died.

I went to the shelf marked LAW OF THE VOICE.

I had never opened it, because I had never needed to.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alpha's Birthday Wish Came True No More Noise and No More Daughter from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.