They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 06

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 06 – 1 Lack the Equipment

Sunday night, I asked Nessa to cut my hair.

It came off just above the shoulders, all one length. Practical. Two people had grabbed it in training and put me on my

back with it, and I have exactly enough ego to hate losing.

When I walked into the common room, my unit whistled and thumped the table like animals.

“You look like someone about to ruin a man’s month,” Nyx observed.

“That’s the idea.”

Monday morning I put on the Commander’s uniform for the first time. Black, silver crown at the collar, the single bar

on the sleeve that means every Captain in the intake year answers to me.

Ansel handed me my coffee without looking up. “You know they all think you’re a man, right? The other Commanders.

They’ve been calling you ‘him’ for a year.”

“Well,” I said. “Last time I checked, I still lack the equipment.”

“You’ve got the balls, though, Commander,” Skye said into her cereal.

I was still laughing when I took the steps of the main building nine minutes late.

Director Hale was waiting outside the council room with the expression of a man watching a lit match get carried into

a fireworks factory.

“They’re all inside.”

“Wonderful.”

I opened the door.

Seven Commanders around a long table. The King at the head. A young man beside him with a jaw you could

cut yourself on. And near the window, arms folded, a tall man with gray eyes who looked up and went completely,

comically still.

“My apologies for being late, Your Majesty,” I said. “One of my people had to remind me that I lack the necessary

equipment to qualify as a man, and I lost track of time.”

Somebody choked on their water.

Every head at that table snapped toward me at once, and I watched seven grown men rearrange twelve months of

assumptions in real time.

“I’m Commander Wren Ashgrove.”

I crossed to the King and bowed, small and correct. “Good morning, Your Majesty. It won’t happen again.”

The King’s face didn’t move at all. His eyes were absolutely dancing.

“Commander Ashgrove. My congratulations to your unit on graduating three weeks early. The first in forty years.”

Actual, audible gasps.

“I’d have that in my bed by Friday,” said a voice in my head.

I didn’t turn. I just marked the direction, the pitch, the shape of it, and filed it.

“Commander Ashgrove,” the King said, “my son. Crown Prince Soren.”

The one with the jaw shook my hand and said, deadpan, “How did your unit take the news that you’re not a man?”

“They pointed out I have the balls anyway, Your Highness.”

Somebody at the table made a strangled noise.

“God,” I said. “I need to ask my team to help me look for my filter. It’s been missing since Tuesday.”

Soren laughed out loud. The gray-eyed one bit the inside of his cheek so hard I could hear it.

“And this,” said the King, “is Commander Kade Locke. Your neighbor for the past year, I believe.”

So THAT’S who’s been living on the other side of my wall, Locke was thinking. Twelve months. Twelve months of

calling her ‘he.’

“Commander,” I said.

“Commander,” he said. His voice did something inconvenient to my spine, which I chose to ignore, because I was

working.

“Would you excuse me one moment, Your Majesty? There’s something I have to do.”

I turned and walked the length of the table.

Gage Thorne was leaning back in his chair, smirking, opening his mouth to say something clever about my height.

I hit him once, with everything I had, on the hinge of the jaw.

He went off the chair and onto the floor like a sack of laundry.

Nobody moved. The King did not move.

I crouched down where he was scrabbling on the carpet and made my voice very quiet and very pleasant.

“Captain Nessa Ryland. Friday. Corridor outside the kitchens. You told her that if she wasn’t naked in your room within the hour, you’d file a fitness report and end her career.”

Thorne’s face went gray.

“If you ever threaten a woman’s career to get her into your bed again,” I said, “the King will be the least of your problems. I will find you, and I will make you regret the day your father met your mother. Are we clear?”

He tried to rise. I shifted my weight forward maybe two inches.

He stayed down.

“Wren,” the King said. Not Commander. “Explain.”

So I did. All of it. And then I asked the question that stopped every man in that room breathing:

“How many women have been washed out of this house on a fitness report, Your Majesty? And how many of those reports were filed by a Commander they said no to?”

The door opened. Two of the King’s own guards came in and picked Thorne up off the floor.

They took him out through the door that doesn’t lead outside.

“After this meeting,” the King said into the silence, “I will speak with each of you Commanders. One at a time. If any of you have ever used those tactics, I suggest you consider what you’d like your last honest sentence to be.”

Six men went very pale.

Kade Locke didn’t. Locke was looking at me the way a man looks at something he’d stopped believing existed.

And then the King slid a file down the table toward me and said the sentence that would eventually put my mother in a

chair in a windowless room.

“Now. Let’s give the Commander the case none of you could close.”