They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 12

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 12

The bond didn’t snap.

It tore.

I’ve been shot. I’ve had silver through the shoulder. I had a child cut out of me on an altar with four claw wounds in him.

This was worse.

It came out through my chest like a hook going backward, and my knees went – but my father’s hand was already under my elbow and my sister’s shoulder was already at my back, and between the two of them I stayed on my feet.

I stayed on my feet.

Kael didn’t.

He went down in the dock screaming, clawing at his own sternum hard enough to tear his shirt open, and the sound he made wasn’t a man’s sound. Two enforcers held him flat. He screamed my name into the marble until his voice broke in

half.

I straightened my mother’s pins.

“Let the record show the bond is severed,” the Speaker said, a little hoarsely. “Remove the prisoner.”

They dragged him out with his heels leaving marks on the floor.

At the doors he twisted around and got out one last thing, and sixty million people heard it, and it is still the most–clipped six seconds of the entire trial:

“I’D GIVE IT ALL BACK! THE VALLEY, THE NAME – VESS, I’D GIVE IT ALL BACK JUST TO HOLD HIM ONCE-”

I didn’t turn around.

Outside, on the steps, in front of a hundred cameras, somebody shouted: “Warden! Anything to say to him?”

I stopped. I thought about it, honestly, for a second.

“He asked me once what I was good for,” I said. “Cooking. Bookkeeping. Waiting up.” I looked into the lens. “Tell him I took his kingdom apart in nine weeks, and I did it during naptime.”

That clip has two hundred and eighty million views.

The rest went faster than I expected.

My mother’s holdings had been sitting in trust since I was nine- mines, freight, two–thirds of the regulated silver in the western hemisphere – waiting for a daughter who kept saying next year, Dad, Kael needs me at home.

I signed for it on a Tuesday and took the chair on a Wednesday.

My father sat behind me at the first board meeting with his ankle on his knee, saying

nothing, and eleven men who had been planning to explain things to me slowly explained nothing to me at all.

bought Thornfell’s carcass out of receivership for thirty–nine cents on the dollar.

Not for revenge. For the three hundred wolves who had nothing to do with what their Alpha did and were about to lose their houses in November. I kept the land. I fired the leadership. I tore down the Hollow with the stone in it and hauled the

Rendering Stone out in four pieces and dropped them in four separate lakes.

The pack asked me to hold the territory in my own right.

A wolfless woman. Asked by wolves.

I said yes.

They painted a new name over the gate: Sablemoor.

She’s two now – my son, I mean. Wren. Small for his age and completely lawless. He has my mother’s eyes and a scar under his shoulder blade shaped like a crescent, and he will not sleep unless the star projector is on, and he calls my sister “Auntie Knife,” which she pretends to hate and has tattooed on her forearm.

He has a grandfather who put down a hunting rifle to learn how to braid hair, badly, and who cries at nursery recitals and threatens the other parents in the car park afterward.

And every year on the ninth of March we drive out to a cairn on the north ridge where there are no dates, only a name, and we sit there until it gets dark, and I tell a pile of stones about her boy.

Last spring, a letter came to the house.

Prison paper. Silver–mine postmark. Handwriting I’d have known anywhere.

I held it a long time.

Then I put it on the fire unopened – and my phone buzzed on the table, and the screen said:

BLACKWATER SILVER – MEDICAL DIVISION.