They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 11

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 11 – Seven Men at My Gate

They came to the gate at 4 p.m.

I watched from a fourth-floor window, because I am apparently still enough of a coward to want a wall between me and my own blood.

Two SUVs. Five men out of the cars. My father in a suit he’d clearly slept in, and four of my brothers – Cassian, Elias,

Bram, Kit. Dorian and Silas were in a hospital forty miles east with a collapsed lung and a shattered femur between

them.

My father hadn’t shaved. Rhodes Ashgrove has shaved every day since 1989.

“Commander,” Juno said behind me. “You don’t have to see them. I’ll tell them you’re deployed.”

“Go down,” Nyx said. “Not for them. For your mother.”

I went down.

They stood in the courtyard with empty hands and straight spines, the way our bloodline trains you to stand when

you’re being judged.

Cassian saw me first.

I watched my oldest brother – thirty-one years old, six-four, the man who taught me to ride and once broke a boy’s nose at a regatta for calling me flat-chested – look directly at my face and not recognize me for a full second. Because of the hair. And the uniform. And the eight inches of distance in my eyes.

Then he did recognize me.

And Cassian Ashgrove made a sound I will hear on my deathbed and went down on one knee in the gravel.

“Get up,” I said.

“Wren-”

“Get up.” My voice came out like an ice pick. “You do not kneel in this courtyard. It belongs to the Crown, not to you.”

He got up.

My father hadn’t moved at all. He was just looking at me. At the crown on my collar. At the bar on my sleeve.

“You’re a Commander of the Ivory Guard,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re eighteen years old.”

“Yes.”

“Wren-”

“Do not,” I said, “say my name yet.”

It was so quiet in that courtyard you could hear the flags.

“Thirteen months,” I said. “I lived in your hunting lodge for eight of them. I ate breakfast alone at your table two hundred times. I asked my mother for one afternoon, twelve separate times, and twelve separate times she said I’m busy. At the council dinner you toasted your children and you named six.”

Elias made a small, broken noise.

“I pulled my own file out of your archive. Do you know what the last entry says?” I looked at my father. “W. turned seventeen today. That’s it. That’s the entire record of my existence. In your handwriting. In your house.”

“I know,” my father said. His voice was gone, sanded down to a rasp. “I know what it says.”

“The King told me why.”

“Then you know-”

“I know you had a reason,” I said. “I know it was a good reason. And I need you to understand it does not undo a single one of those three hundred and sixty-five days, because I lived them not knowing. I lived them believing I was worth so little that seven people who share my blood could look through me like glass.”

I let that sit.

“You didn’t protect me,” I said. “You protected the secret. And you decided a scared girl was an acceptable loss”

My father’s face broke apart.

Rhodes Ashgrove, who has stared down cartels and councils and hurricanes, stood in a courtyard and wept in front

of his sons.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did.”

Something old and locked in my chest twisted at the sound of it. I hated that. I hated that after everything, a part of me was still eleven years old and sitting at a small desk in his office, waiting to be looked at.

“Where’s Mom?”

Cassian stepped forward with a phone. “They sent this ninety minutes ago.”

A video. My mother on a chair in a room with no windows. Her hair down. A cut on her cheekbone.

And behind her, a man in his sixties with silver hair and a signet ring – Cyrus Blackthorn, whose grandfather broke

Seraphine Ashgrove over nine years – leaning down toward the camera.

“Rhodes. Old friend. I’ve been patient for a very long time.”

“Your Luna tells me you have no daughter. Your archive says the same. Your staff say the same. That’s very good

work. I nearly believed it.”

“But girls talk, Rhodes. Especially girls you throw away.” He smiled. “I have it on excellent authority that a Wren

Ashgrove posted the highest intake scores in the history of the Ivory Guard. And that she ended a two-year border war

in ninety-four minutes by asking two questions.”

“Two questions, Rhodes. From a stranger. In a field of ninety armed men.”

“You know what she is. So do I.”

“You have until midnight to hand her to me, or I send you Isolde in pieces and take the girl anyway.”

The video ended.

My entire unit had come down behind me. Nobody spoke.

“Wren,” my father said. “You are not going to that meet. I came here to tell you we’re handling it. I came here to make

sure you were behind these walls.”

I laughed. God help me, I actually laughed.

“You still don’t get it,” I said. “You spent a year hiding a weapon. You should have spent it training one.”

I turned to my Captains.

“Juno, Torin – vehicles. Enzo, drone package. Nessa, get me every property Blackthorn owns within four hours of

that coast road. Filter for no windows and no cell signal.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Locke.” I didn’t even have to look. He was already there. “I need six of yours.”

“You’ve got twelve and me.”

Then I turned back to my father and my brothers, standing in that courtyard with nothing left to give.

“Get in the car,” I said. “You’re not in charge. You’re not consulted. You’ll do exactly what I tell you, or you’ll sit in a van

and listen.”

“Wren,” Cassian whispered. “Why are you helping us?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m helping her.”