All Chapters of After the Alpha Rejected Me, I Came Back with His Twins: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Damien's POVIt went off in my chest like a house falling down.I was two hundred yards up the west line, moving on ground I have known since I was nine, and it had been coming at me all the way down the hill — everything she has not let herself have in three years, arriving in one piece, and I had been walking through it the way you walk into hail.Then it went off all at once, and that meant she had found him, and I stopped caring about anything else in the world.Left, my wolf said. Go left and go now.I came out of the trees at a flat run and everything after that took about ninety seconds.Four of them. Three standing off with their backs to the middle. One in a ring cut in the ice with a hooded lantern and a book.And a child standing on the water-stone in a coat with his boots on the wrong feet.The clerk saw me at forty yards and did not run.That is the part I still cannot get out of my head. Sedge is a narrow, tidy man of fifty who has been afraid of me since I was twenty-thr

Damien's POVThey let me stand up on the fourth of January and I went to the Circle on the fifth.Hesper Nolan told me I was a fool and Wren Halloway told me I was a fool and Elder Mara said that she had been telling Kane men that for sixty years and had never once been listened to, and then she sent for the Pack.Four hundred wolves. Same stone. Same low place worn into the middle of it that fills with water when it rains, and it had rained, so it was full.I stood where I stood three years ago in October and I found out something in the first ten seconds that I had not thought about once.At the back of that Circle, a hundred and twenty feet away, there are wolves who cannot hear a man speak.Every other time I have stood on this stone, that has not been a problem, because what came out of me did not travel as sound. It went out over four hundred wolves like weather and the ones at the back got it in the chest the same as the ones at the front.I opened my mouth on the fifth of Janua

"Then nobody touches it," I said.Mara had her hand on the latch of the records room door. She took it off."Not you, not me, not the two Deltas standing over it. Who looked at it last, and when?""I did. Ten past four, sunset, with my own lamp. My mark is in the post book at the stair-head.""Then the post book comes off that stair-head tonight, and nobody writes another line in it."She took me out.The archive corridor runs forty feet from the head of the stair to the inner door. Two lamps, both at the stair end, so the last dozen feet lie in the dark. Boards that talk, and a press of old maps along one wall.The seal is not wax. It is a strip of linen tape across the join, carried round the jamb and pinched at either end into lead on a wire.Somebody had cut that tape along the join with something thin and laid it back down. The lead was squeezed shut again by a hand that knew the tool. Mara's initials were still on it in ink, in two halves now, and the halves sat a hair out of tr

I took a clean sheet off the top of Ames's pile, laid it over the handling column, and set the quarter-ounce weight on the corner to hold it flat."Enter the name in full," I said. "Then cover it."Ames's pencil stopped. "Cover it.""It goes into the record. It doesn't get to walk around the room." White paper over four inches of ink, and the ink still under it. "Three years ago this Council kept a book with my name in it and a line saying there was no living subject, and everybody believed the handwriting. A name is a door you go through. It isn't what's on the other side of it."Mara had not taken her hand off the page. "You think he is owed that much.""I think if we start at Sedge, everything we turn over tonight is a thing Sedge did, and we stop the minute it fits."I want him, Nyx said. She had been low in me since the beam settled. More than you do.I know. Hands flat."Four columns, Ames. Rule them wide."He turned the sheet long-ways."One. What the book says. Two. What had t

Mara put the consent sheet in my hand at the porch rail while Ames was still tying the first nomination in.One line at the top, in a hand that was not mine.Candidate consent — Damien Kane.Under it, two ruled boxes the size of a thumbprint. ACCEPT. DECLINE."Whenever you're ready, Kane," she said.I did not sign it.Sign the first box on that porch at noon, in front of the wolves already on the steps, and I would be telling this Pack what I wanted before it had said a word.Sign the second and I would be taking back the question I had put to them. My petition asked this Pack to choose again. A man who asks for a judgment and then walks out from under it has answered it himself.Either box, signed in that minute, was one more Kane deciding for four hundred people.So I put the sheet inside my coat and went to find work.Cole came round the house with the day book under his arm and found me at the bottom of the steps with nothing in my hands."Noon delivery's been sitting in the yard