They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 06

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 06

My father took the pack healer by the collar out of the wreckage of the east wall and hauled him up one–handed.

“You keep her breathing,” he said, and pressed a black vial into the man’s palm. “Anything you need, you say the word and it will be in this room in an hour. Anything you can’t have, I’ll go and take.”

The healer looked at the vial and went the color of paper. Warden’s draught. You cannot buy it. There are eleven doses a year and the Hunt makes all of them.

He put it straight into my thigh.

Ice went up my spine. The room stopped sliding. The screaming edge of the pain dulled into something I could think through, and the black spreading under my skin faded back to red.

“Pup?” my father asked.

The healer’s hands were already moving. “Alive. Barely. Distressed for hours. If I open her now she bleeds out, if I wait we

lose him-”

“Then take the bleeding first,” my father said. “She stays.”

He sat down on the edge of the Rendering Stone, took my hand in both of his, and his hands were shaking. I had never seen my father’s hands shake. Not once.

“Nobody touches you again,” he said. “Not while I’ve got fingers.”

Behind him, Elara had gotten herself under Kael’s arm and was crying beautifully.

“Vesper, I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to fall in love with him. I never meant for him to mark me while you were-” she let it hang, let every wolf in that ruin hear it “–but please. Please. Don’t let them hurt me. I’ve got your wolf inside me. If they kill me, she dies too.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

From her face, she’d thought of nothing else.

Kael’s head snapped around, and his eyes went red again – not at her.

At me.

“Haven’t you humiliated me enough?” he shouted. “It was me. All of it. I ordered the Rendering, I marked her, she begged me not to – and you bring hunters to my door and lie on that stone like a martyr-”

He pointed at my face.

“You want to know why? You cook. You keep the books. You wait up.” His voi

ce climbed. “That’s the whole of you, Vesper. You’re safe and you’re dull and you’ve been the same woman for six years She’s light. She closed the Marrow Creek deal for me last quarter. What have you ever closed?”

I started laughing, and it hurt, and I couldn’t stop.

Because I remembered a night eight years ago when a twenty–six–year–old Alpha with no seat and no money knelt on my mother’s kitchen floor and sobbed into my knees.

They’ll take the valley, Vess. They’ll break my hands. You’re the only person alive who can save me.

So I signed over my mother’s silver claim. Thirty million in raw ore, her entire dowry, the last thing on this earth I could hold that she had held. I mortgaged both my properties behind my father’s back. I went from a Warden’s heir with a coat in a box to a woman with nothing but a mate.

And he held my face and swore:

“When Thornfell stands, every acre goes in your name. I’ll never let you want for anything again.”

He also said, You’ll never lift a finger. You just be happy.

Two years ago I stepped in front of a silver bolt in a parking structure, four months along with a pup we lost the next

week, and I never told him, because he was so tired.

I wore forty–dollar coats so his suits could cost four thousand.

And he stood in my blood and called me dull.

“Kael,” I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised both of us. “Who knelt on my mother’s floor and cried into my

lap?

His face darkened.

“Who swore every acre would be in my name?”

“That was then.” He spat it. “You’ve got nothing now. So here’s how tonight ends. You call your father’s men off my land, and you get on your knees and apologize to Elara for the lies you’ve been telling about her. Do it well, and I’ll let the healer finish with you.”

He glanced at my ruined stomach and his mouth curved.

“Otherwise you can lie there and rot with whatever’s left of it.”

The Hollow went very quiet.

My father slowly let go of my hand and reached inside his coat.