They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 14

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 14 The Girl With Eight Years

I opened it in front of the King.

One sheet of heavy paper. A woman’s handwriting. Elegant. Unhurried.

Commander Ashgrove,

My father is old, stupid, and now in a Crown cell, which is where sentimental men belong.

I have no interest in owning you. That was his century’s ambition, not mine.

You should know two things.

One: yours is not the only bloodline that was hunted. Ask your King what happened to the other one – the line that could hear a lie. Ask him why there is no living record of them. Ask gently. He was there.

Two: there is a girl, nine years old, in a house outside Oslo, who woke last spring able to do what you do. She is not an Ashgrove. She has no six brothers, no boy with gray eyes, and no army.

She has eight years.

What will you do with them, Commander?

– S. Blackthorn

I read it twice, then set it on the table.

The King had gone absolutely white.

“Your Majesty,” I said. “Is there a second bloodline?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“That,” he said, “is a conversation for a locked room.”

“Then lock one,” I said. “I’ll bring coffee.”

Here’s where I am now.

Nine days later, I’m standing in a clearing on my family’s western border wearing a dress the color of a bruise, in front

of two hundred people.

They threw the party.

Eleven months of planning, thirteen months late, and my mother did not cut a single item – not the indigo, not the

oxblood, not the ridiculous menu of every dish I ever cooked for our kitchens.

The King came as a witness, exactly as they’d planned it a year ago. He stood in front of two hundred members of eleven packs and formally acknowledged Wren Eleanor Ashgrove – daughter of the Ashgrove line, Unit Commander of the Ivory Guard – and made it clear, in the way only kings can, that anyone who touches me touches the Crown.

Cyrus Blackthorn will never see the outside of a cell. Damon Vance’s name was struck from the Book of Alphas the

same week.

My six brothers got up one at a time and each told a story about me that made me want to die.

Dorian came on crutches to tell the one about the phone. “Hewwo, Ashgwove house. Who you want?” Two hundred people laughed. I threw a bread roll at his bad leg.

Then my mother stood up with a shoebox.

Eighteen notebooks. One for every year. Every color I ever said I liked, every song, every dumb opinion, in her handwriting, starting the year I was born.

“I kept a list,” she said, to a field of two hundred people who could all see her face. “A hundred and forty-one items. My daughter has crossed off a hundred and forty of them herself, which is the most Wren thing that has ever happened.”

She looked at me.

“Item one,” she said. “She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.”

Her voice went.

“I failed item one. I failed it for three hundred and sixty-five days, and I will spend the rest of my life doing it over. Wren – you were wanted. You were wanted before you existed. Your brother asked for you the day before you arrived, and

the universe said yes.”

Nobody in that field had a dry face. Including me, and I’ve been shot at.

I’m not going to tell you I forgave them in that moment. I forgave them in pieces, over months, the way people actually forgive – badly, and backward, and mostly on Sundays at a greasy diner where my mother orders a salad and then

eats half my fries.

Here’s what I know.

I’m eighteen. I run seven teams and thirty-five lives. I have a Captain getting married in the spring and a boy with gray eyes who put a ring in his desk drawer three weeks ago and thinks I don’t know, even though I can hear the box when

he opens it.