Alpha Mate Slept With His Sister-in-Law, I Left Chapter 09
I walked past Kael. Asher walked toward him slowly from the other end of the hall.
He told me later what happened.
Kael saw him, and his eyes lit up. This was his son. A year unseen, and half a head taller.
Asher stopped in front of Kael and looked at him steadily. Kael reached for his head. Asher moved his head out of reach.
Asher took something out of an inside pocket and pressed it into Kael’s palm. A rusted thumbtack with a small blue dot painted on the metal cap.
Kael didn’t understand.
“It’s the thumbtack I used to pin my drawings up with,” Asher said. “Mommy tore the drawings down. The thumbtacks were still there. I had grandfather’s people pull them off the wall, one by one, and mail them to me. Forty-seven of them.”
He paused.
“I was going to ask if you remembered the drawings. But thinking about it, you probably never noticed them at all.”
Kael’s fist closed on the thumbtack. The point cut into his palm. He opened his mouth. He couldn’t get one word out.
Asher took a step back and looked up. His voice was clear and steady, the voice of a five-and-a-half-year-old, and every corner of the corridor could hear it.
“Mr. Kael. My mother is the Alpha King of Northcrest. Please stop following her. You have your own pack and your own Luna. Please go home.”
He turned. He walked off without looking back.
Kael stayed on his knees in the corridor. Blood from his palm tracked down the side of the thumbtack and dripped onto the marble.
Marcus told me later that Kael knelt there almost twenty minutes. Nobody came to lift him.
I was in the Alpha King’s study by then.
The window faced north. You could see the edge of the pine forest at the Northcrest border. Different from the pines on the Ironridge side, these were older and denser. The wind through them sounded low.
Asher pushed the door open. He set a cup of hot tea down in front of me and sat next to me.
He didn’t ask what I was looking at.
The chair was straight-backed. Harder than I’d expected. My father had sat in this chair for thirty years. He had worn that curve into it.
It was mine now.
The tea was still hot. Asher cupped his small hands around the porcelain to warm them. He looked out the window at the pines
too.
He never asked the extra question. He knew when to speak and when to just sit there.
We sat until the pine forest was all the way through with the last of the afternoon light. The shadows of the trees stretched long, all the way to the foot of the estate wall.
The rest came through Marcus, in pieces.
Kael went back to Ironridge with his people. He came back hollowed out. The first thing he did was tell Vivienne to end the
pregnancy. “Asher is my only heir. There will be no others.”
Vivienne refused. She and Helena had him locked in the main estate for three days and forced him to sign the Marking ceremony contract. The ceremony went through with Vivienne in tears
They tore each other apart for three months.
One night Kael was drunk. They were fighting in the living room. Three months of swallowed words came out at once. Vivienne lunged at him. Kael pushed her off.
She fell, and the back of her head clipped the corner of the glass coffee table with a small sound. She was gone. So was the baby.
Kael stood in the living room a few seconds. He opened his phone. He scrolled to the only photo he still had of me and Asher. The one from our apartment balcony when Asher was three. Asher had the worn-down grey wolf plush tucked under one arm.
He looked at it for a long time. He pulled a full bottle of sleeping pills out of a drawer and swallowed them. He set the phone over his chest and lay down next to Vivienne.
The morning maid pushed the door open.
When Marcus brought the news to Northcrest I was in the study teaching Asher how to read a map.
My pen paused for a few seconds.
Asher looked up. “Mother. Your pen stopped over that river.”
He lowered his eyes and slid his small finger along the longest river in the north.
He didn’t ask. I didn’t tell.
A few weeks later Helena came to the Northcrest gates with what was left of the Thorne elders. They knelt outside and asked to see Asher. They wanted him to come back and inherit Ironridge.
Asher heard the housekeeper out. He looked at me. I looked away..
He set down the pencil. “Ironridge has nothing to do with me,” he told the housekeeper. “Tell them to leave.”
Helena knelt out there a full day. Asher did not go out. The guards walked her off at sundown.
Ironridge passed to a distant Thorne cousin Helena named in haste. They lost three border holds in the first year. I told Marcus to stop bringing me reports.
That morning Asher was up before me.
He was already on the balcony when I came down, hands on the railing, looking east. He was wearing one of my old quilted jackets that my mother had dug up; it had been mine at seven. The sleeves were long, and he had rolled them up three times.
He turned when he heard me. “Mother. Look over there.”
The first light along the ridge wasn’t really light yet. Just a softening of the sky.
“Wait.” He said. “It’s coming.”
He didn’t blink.
The first edge of the sun pushed up over the ridge. The whole sky went bright in one second. It hit the estate root. It hit the thirty -year-old cypress in the yard. It hit the three folded cuffs of his sleeve.
“There it is.” He said it flat – not as a comment, but as a fact.
I looked at him sideways. He was looking more and more like my father at that age, not like Kael. He had the bone of the north: quiet and solid.
Six years ago I had stood at the edge of the pine forest at the Ironridge border and thought I was looking at the way home.
The way honie was this.
That last morning of the year, Asher and I stood on the third-floor balcony of the Northcrest estate. The northern dawn was cold. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge.
Asher pointed at the line of mountains just starting to lighten. “Mother. Look how red it is today.”
I didn’t answer. The sun came over us all at once.
The line that had pressed on my chest for six years, the thing I had called love which had never been love, broke.