They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 08

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 08 – You Have Isolde’s Eyes

Two old Alphas, ninety armed sons and soldiers, and one girl in the middle of a field.

Garrick Redmarch is seventy-four and built like a bull that’s been dying angrily for a decade. Emory Hollowbrook is eighty, thin as wire, with a cane he doesn’t need.

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

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

Redmarch opened his mouth to bark something about ancestral right.

And Nyx went absolutely still inside 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 Hollowbrook.

“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 men shifted, confused, waiting for orders that didn’t come.

“Nobody has farmed this land in a hundred and eighteen years,” I said. “You’ve each spent two years and a fortune making sure the other one doesn’t own it. You don’t want the land, my lords. You want it closed.”

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

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

Hollowbrook 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 Redmarch’s whiskey to get the story, and I sent my whole unit thirty yards back so

two old men could stop performing.

In 1908, both packs buried something here.

A girl.

Nineteen years old. Married out of a third bloodline to seal a trade agreement between them. She died fourteen

months later. The mating certificate was destroyed. Both packs agreed the field would stay empty forever, and both

had spent a century terrified that the other would one day dig her up and use her

“Whose daughter?” I asked.

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

“Whose daughter.”

“They never gave the bloodline,” Hollowbrook 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 old cracked voice inside his skull.

The Ashgrove girl.

My hands went cold.

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

“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 as a memorial and posts a warden. You both stop paying ninety men 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.”

Redmarch, who has hated Hollowbrook since the Nixon administration, was the one who broke.

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

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

paper.

As they were leaving, the old man stopped in front of me and stared at my face for a long, long moment

“Forgive an old man,” he said. “You have Isolde Ashgrove’s eyes.”

The world tipped eleven degrees.

“You know my mother?”

“Knew her father.” He’d gone very pale. “You’re the Ashgrove girl.”

“I’m Commander Ashgrove.”

“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, my lord.”

“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.” His grip tightened. “That’s what’s buried out here, girl. That’s what both our packs

agreed to bury.”

He let go.

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

“I don’t have a father,” I said, and got in the car.

I ended a two-year war in ninety-four minutes. The King called it the fastest arbitration in the history of the Ivory Guard. My unit was insufferable the entire drive back.

I didn’t hear a word of it.

Because I finally understood what Nessa 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 that stopped speaking my name the morning after my seventeenth birthday.

We pulled into campus at dawn.

Juno 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 while we slept.

The card was lying on the floor.