The Alpha's Regret: Losing His True Mate novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Boxes in the Yard

The new Luna-elect has Faye's cottage emptied and her wages held; Faye claims her right to be cleared on the Stone, and Jarrett's mother demands the ring on her table tonight.

I did not answer him.

I shut my side of the pack link, and he knocked on it twice more before he stopped.

I walked home across the lawn in my torn dress, with every window of the pack hall lit behind me.

The Gamma house was a two-room cottage at the edge of the garden.

It had been mine for eight years.

I lay down on top of the blanket in my clothes and did not sleep.

At dawn, something heavy hit the grass outside my window.

I opened the door and found two guards carrying my desk down the front steps.

A third guard was stacking my boxes on the lawn, and one of them had burst open.

My plain work skirts lay in the wet grass.

Imogen stood on the porch of the pack hall across the path, in a silk robe, holding a cup of coffee.

The ring was on her left hand.

A strip of clear tape ran under the band to hold it to her finger.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Clearing the cottage," she said. "The Luna-elect needs it for her family. My aunts arrive tomorrow."

"This is the Gamma house."

"And the Gamma quit." She sipped her coffee. "You put your badge on a table in front of three hundred people, Faye. I'm only taking you at your word."

"My release is not until the new moon. The house is mine until then."

"The house belongs to the pack," Imogen said. "And I'm holding your last wages until the ring business is settled."

"The ring was found."

"After you'd had time to put it back."

"A guest saw it fall off your hand."

"A guest from the pack across the ridge," she said gently. "Whose Alpha has been trying to steal our Gamma for three years. Everyone knows that. Why would anyone believe him?"

It was true that Darek Wardell had asked me to come to Ironwood.

I had never told anyone but Jarrett.

A crowd had started to gather on the grass.

Groundskeepers in work gloves. Two of the maids. The cooks from the kitchen, still in their aprons.

They looked at my boxes and then at me, and none of them came closer.

I looked up at the pack hall's second floor.

Jarrett stood in the window of his office in his shirtsleeves.

He had seen the guards carry my desk out.

He had seen me in the grass.

He did not open the window, and he did not come down.

"Faye."

Bess pushed through the crowd with her red hair tied up in a dish towel and flour to her elbows.

She was carrying my clipboard.

"I got this off the service cart last night," she said. "I figured you'd want your own party files."

"Thank you," I said, and my voice shook for the first time.

She hugged me hard with the clipboard crushed between us.

"I'll carry anything you tell me to carry," she said into my ear. "Just say where."

I looked at the clipboard.

Under the schedule was every receipt for every vendor I had hired for that party, in my own handwriting, with dates.

I stood up straight.

"Imogen," I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

"Under pack law, any wolf who is accused of a crime has the right to be heard on the Stone before the elders," I said. "I'm claiming it."

The crowd murmured.

"I'm not asking you to take back what you said," I said. "I'm asking that it be said again in front of the elders, where everyone can hear."

Imogen's smile stayed exactly where it was.

"Of course," she said. "I have nothing to hide."

She looked around the lawn and raised her voice a little.

"Tomorrow noon, then, in the Stone Hall. I'd hate for anyone in this pack to think I was unfair."

A few people nodded.

"Until then," she said, "someone should see she doesn't wander off with anything else."

A guard stepped to my side.

"I'll be at the kitchen," I said. "With my friend. You can wait outside the door."

"No," Imogen said. "Here, on the lawn, where I can see you."

"Then we'll sit on the lawn," Bess said, and she dropped onto a box.

I sat down beside her on my own boxes with my clipboard in my lap.

The sun came up over the garden wall and warmed my dress.

The guard stood over us, and the crowd began to drift apart.

Then someone near the back of the crowd said, "Excuse me."

A woman with silver-streaked auburn hair and a cane walked through the gap the pack made for her.

She did not need the cane.

I knew that because she had taught me how to fold the table linens for a Luna's dinner when I was twenty-one.

Muriel Brandis, Jarrett's mother, stopped in front of her son's fiancée.

She looked at the tape on Imogen's finger.

"I'll sit on that hearing," she said. "I'm still an elder of this pack."

"Of course, Muriel," Imogen said.

"And I want that ring on my table tonight," Muriel said. "Take the tape off first."

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