Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 08

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 08 – Elowen Hale’s Eyes

Alpha Ordell Thorncross is seventy-four and built like a bull that’s been dying angrily for a decade. Alpha Morrow Greywater is eighty, thin as wire, with a cane he doesn’t need.

“They’ve sent a child,” Thorncross said.

“They’ve sent a Ravenguard Commander,” I said. “First question. Why do you want this land?”

He opened his mouth to bark something about ancestral right.

And Nyx went absolutely still in my head, and I heard the thing under his answer – the thought sitting beneath the

words like a stone under water.

Because if HE gets it, he’ll dig.

I turned to Greywater.

“Second question. What’s buried out here?”

The old man’s cane hit the ground.

Both of them stopped breathing at the same time. Ninety wolves shifted, confused, waiting for orders that didn’t

come.

“Nobody’s used this land in a hundred and eighteen years,” I said. “You’ve spent two years and a fortune making sure

the other one doesn’t own it. You don’t want the land, Alphas. You want it closed.”

“There’s nothing out here,” Thorncross growled.

“Then you’ll have no objection to a survey.”

Greywater sat down slowly on the low stone wall behind him and put his face in his hands.

It took forty minutes and a bottle of Thorncross’s whiskey. I sent my entire unit thirty yards back so two old men could stop performing.

In 1908, both packs buried something in that field.

A girl.

Nineteen years old. Mated off from a third pack to seal a trade agreement between them. She died fourteen months later. The mating record was destroyed. Both packs agreed the field would stay empty forever – and both of them spent a century terrified the other would one day dig her up and use her.

–

“Whose daughter?” I asked.

Thorncross looked at the grass. “Doesn’t matter. She’s been dead a hundred years.”

“Whose daughter.”

“They never gave us the pack name,” Greywater said, and I heard the lie land in his chest like a dropped plate.

He was thinking it, though. Clear as a bell, in that cracked old voice inside his skull.

The Hale girl.

&

My hands went cold.

I kept my face perfectly still, because I’ve had a year of practice holding my face perfectly still while my chest caves

“Here’s your solution,” I said. “You cede the land jointly, in perpetuity, to the Crown. Neither pack owns it. Neither pack can dig. The Crown consecrates it and posts a warden. You both stop paying ninety warriors to stand in a field and you both start sleeping.”

Silence.

“And you put her name on a stone,” I said. “Whoever she was. She was somebody’s girl before she was your problem.”

Thorncross, who has hated Greywater since the Nixon administration, broke first.

“Fine,” he said hoarsely. “God help me. Fine.”

They signed at ten p.m. on the hood of my SUV, and Greywater’s hands shook so badly Orson had to hold the paper.

As he was leaving, the old Alpha stopped in front of me and stared at my face for a long, long moment.

“Forgive an old man,” he said. “You have Elowen Hale’s eyes.”

The world tipped about eleven degrees.

“You know my mother?”

“Knew her father.” He was very pale. “You’re the Hale girl.”

“I’m Commander Hale.”

“Child.” His hand closed on my forearm and his voice dropped so low that nobody on earth without my ears could have caught it. “Does anyone know what you are?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” he whispered. “You’ve been listening to my thoughts for the last hour.”

Every hair on my body stood up.

“Do not answer that,” Nyx said sharply.

“Good night, Alpha.”

“They killed the last one,” he said, and his eyes were wet. “Not in a field. In a house. Slowly, over nine years, by a mate who found out what she could do. That’s what’s buried out here, girl. That’s what both our packs agreed to bury.”

He let go of my arm.

“Go home. Get behind your family’s walls.”

“I don’t have a family,” I said.

And I got in the car.

I ended a two-year war in ninety-four minutes. The King called it the fastest arbitration in Ravenguard history. My unit

was insufferable the entire drive back.

I didn’t hear a word of it.

Because I finally understood what Talia had tried to tell me. Two bloodlines on record.

And I was doing math I did not want to do a girl with my mother’s eyes, buried in 1908, and a family who started

screaming at me in silence the morning after my seventeenth birthday.

We pulled in at dawn.

Fiona went up the steps ahead of me to unlock our wing, and stopped dead.

Before we left, she’d wedged a playing card into the doorframe at ankle height, because a few of them had a feeling

somebody had been coming into our quarters.

The card was lying on the floor.