Episode 127

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MIKAEL'S POV

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A scowl overtakes my cast as I set eyes on the fair-headed man bent over a walking stick, not from age but for a ruse. "Missed the train home, Whelan?" The bitterness yet stored within seeps into my tone.

"Whelan?" The old, heavy voice rumbles like a clap of thunder rolling down the beak of a mountain. Long ago, in a distant land bound by time, I'd been a lad afraid of its owner. "I imagined I was once Seanathair to you, Mikael. Ain't it so, Cillian?" Cillian pulls further out from the woods—left untouched and spared from Saskia's dismantling—at the query.

I do not give the coward a chance to voice his opinion. "You mean nothing to me. I don't remember a grandfather. Nay, I recall a sadistic fiend who gloated in sacrificing others for his evil causes—his family included."

As patronising as the word might ever entail, Whelan corrects, "Family means naught without loyalty. I attack not those under my wings. You must've understood that by now, Alpha of Guttenbrie