They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 13

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 13 Item One

She wouldn’t let go of my hand in the ambulance.

I let her hold it. I want that on the record, because I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t.

At the hospital my father came down the corridor at a dead run and stopped six feet short, like there was glass in the

air.

He looked at my mother. He looked at me.

“Go on,” I said. “She’s yours.”

He caught her, and held on, and over her shoulder he looked at me with an expression I have never seen on Rhodes

Ashgrove’s face in my life.

“Wren,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Sign the King’s protection order and stop trying to manage my life.”

“Understood, Commander.”

Commander. From my father. Something in my sternum tilted.

Dorian was awake by then and Silas was out of surgery, and by two in the morning I was standing in a hospital room

with six brothers, four on their feet and two full of morphine, and none of us knowing how to start.

Kit started it. Kit is the second youngest and has never held anything in for his entire life.

“We made you a binder,” he blurted.

“What?”

He put his phone in my hand, still shaking.

Photos. Dozens of them. A wall in Cassian’s office, covered floor to ceiling.

Fabric swatches, indigo and oxblood, pinned in rows with dates. A seating chart. A drawing of a stage in a clearing.

A menu composed entirely of food I like, half of it dishes I’d cooked for the pack kitchens myself – which meant

somebody had been writing them down.

And in the center, a printed list six feet long, a hundred and forty-one items, most of them crossed off.

WREN – 18.

At the top, in my mother’s handwriting, from eighteen years ago, faded and taped over three times:

Item 1. She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.

Item one. Not crossed off.

I stood in a hospital corridor at two in the morning and looked at item one, and I broke.

Not gracefully. Not like a Commander. Like an eighteen-year-old girl who’d eaten breakfast alone two hundred times.

Cassian caught me. Then Elias. Then all of them, even Dorian reaching out of the bed, and I was in the middle of a pile of enormous idiots who were all crying – and then my mother came in and made it worse.

“I have every list,” she said into my hair. “Every color you ever mentioned. Every song. Eighteen notebooks, Wren. They’re in my desk and I couldn’t open the drawer all year because I was so afraid of what I was doing to you.”

“Then why didn’t you open it,” I said. “Once. Once, Mom.”

“Because I thought I’d have you afterward,” she whispered. “I thought I was borrowing a year. And you were gone eleven days before I noticed, and I will carry that until I die.”

We are not fixed. I want to be honest about that. You don’t unmake a year in a hospital corridor. There are things I’ll flinch at for the rest of my life: closed office doors, the phrase not now, the sound of a family talking into their phones

at a dinner table.

But at four a.m. my mother took my hand and said, “Sunday. Just us. Terrible movies and the greasy diner.”

And I said, “I’m deployed Sunday.”

And she said, “Then the Sunday after.”

And I said, “Yes.”

Twelve times I asked her. She’s asked me once, and I said yes, and I’m not sorry.

Damon Vance came to the campus gate the next morning.

I made him wait forty minutes in the rain, and then I went down, because I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

He’d lost weight. A broken bond does that to the one who breaks it – the wolf turns on its owner. His father’s pack had been stripped of its charter by lunchtime and every bank on the continent had closed its doors to him by three.

“Wren.” He reached through the bars. “I can take it back. The rejection. If you accept me again, the bond-”

“Eleven million dollars,” I said.

He stopped.

“You sold me to the man whose grandfather broke Seraphine Ashgrove over nine years.” I stepped back out of reach “The Moon gave you a gift, Damon. You priced it.”

“I’ll die without you-”

“Yes,” I said. “You will. Slowly, I hope.”

I walked away and I didn’t look back, and Nyx sang inside my skull the entire way up the steps.

Kade Locke drove me back from the hospital at dawn the following day.

Neither of us spoke for forty minutes. Then he said, “You didn’t ask permission. Not the King. Not Hale. You took

command of an operation involving your own mother.”

“Are you writing me up?”

“I’m asking you to have dinner with me.”

I looked at the road for a while.

“There’s an oath,” I said.

“There’s an exception in the oath,” he said. “For a lawful mating or engagement.”

“That’s a hell of a first date to propose.”

“I’m a planner.” He kept his eyes forward, but his ears had gone red, which I found deeply satisfying. “Also, I should tell you something before you say yes or no, because you’ll find out at the next council anyway. I’m not just a Commander.”

“I know.”

He nearly put us in a ditch. “You know?”

“You’re the Royal Beta’s son. You take your father’s post the day Soren takes the crown. Your whole team is future Crown staff.” I shrugged. “You all have the same posture and not one of you has ever complained about the food.”

“Nobody knows that.”

“Kade.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. “I can hear your heartbeat from the next building. It goes stupid every time I walk into a room. You’ve been the worst-kept secret in my life for six months.”

Silence.

Then: Is it doing it now?”

“It’s been doing it since the hospital.”

He pulled over on an empty road at sunrise and kissed me, and I let him, and Nyx had the manners to stay extremely

quiet for once.

We got back to campus at seven.

There was a black car parked in front of our wing that belonged to nobody at the Ivory Guard.

And Juno was standing on the steps with a sealed envelope in her hands and a look on her face I did not like at all.

“Commander,” she said. “This came an hour ago. Hand delivered.”

The seal was black wax.

Blackthorn.