Unmarked: My Mate Refused, The Alpha King Didn't novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Unmarked

Elsie's POV

Thane crossed the study in three strides and dropped to his knees beside my chair.

He took my wrist, and the heat of me must have scalded him, because I saw him flinch.

Then he turned my hand over and put his mouth to the inside of it.

It was a new place, the soft skin where the pulse beats, and the fever bent under his lips.

I let out a long, shaking breath.

"Better?" he asked against my wrist.

"A little."

His hand was trembling around mine.

I noticed it, and I told myself it was the cold of the stone floor.

"What's wrong with you?" I said. "You look like you've been hit."

He told me the rest, kneeling there.

The lords wanted my shoulder, and they wanted it before the Moot ended.

"I told them no," he said. "I'm telling you now, because you're free to go, Elsie. The marriage is void, the Stone has spoken, and the seven days are nearly done."

"Go where?"

"Anywhere you want. I'll send a guard and a purse and nobody will stop you."

I looked at him.

Jasper's voice rose in my head from the banquet hall, with a crushed wrist and a sneer.

He only wants a queen for the vote.

Thane had not denied it that night.

He was denying it now, on his knees, and every instinct I owned said that a man who needed a queen would say exactly this.

"You want me to walk out," I said.

"I want you to be able to."

"That's a very clean way to say it."

"It's the only way I know," he said.

"Then I'd like to hear the lords say it."

His head came up.

"Elsie."

"I'd like to hear them say what they asked of you, in their own mouths, with you standing there."

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