All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Freda's pot turned out to hold a mutton stew with barley in it, and I ate two bowls of it sitting on the ground with my back against a turf wall, and I am not ashamed of either. There is a thing that happens to a body that has been running on fear for four days when somebody finally puts hot food in front of it. Mine gave up all at once. My hands started shaking around the spoon and would not stop, and Freda looked at them and said nothing and simply put a second bowl down where I could reach it, which is the kindest thing anybody did for me that week. My mother slept for two hours on the bench in the last of the sun. Nobody moved her. Forty rogues walked round that bench all afternoon at a distance of six feet as though it had been fenced. I watched her sleep for a while, because I have not yet got over being allowed to. She slept the way people sleep outdoors, which is badly and completely at the same time, one hand closed on the edge of the blanket as though somebody might come a

They came for me at first light, and I was already dressed, because I had not been to bed. I want to put down what Thursday morning was actually like, rather than what it ought to have been like, because the two are not related. It was cold. There was a mist off the harbour that had come up the streets as far as the hill and stopped there, so that the top of Moonfall was clear and the bottom of it had disappeared, and walking up to the old arena I had the distinct sensation of leaving a city that was no longer underneath me. I was not afraid. I have gone looking for the fear since and I cannot find it anywhere in the morning. What I had instead was a kind of enormous tidiness. Everything I owned was where I had put it. The certified copy was inside my dress against my ribs, and the note was in my mother's hands three miles north because I had given it to her at the camp and told her that if it went badly she was to take it to the Keeper and to nobody else. My hair was plaited close

Nobody moved. I have been asked since what the arena did in that moment and the true answer is that it did nothing at all, for slightly longer than was comfortable. Two thousand people who had come to watch a fight were being shown a piece of paper, and there is no noise for that. The champion stopped four feet behind me. I know that because I heard him stop. He did not touch me. Whatever else that man was, he had been paid for a trial and not for a murder, and the difference mattered to him, and I have thought about that more kindly since than I expected to. The officer of the trial looked at the document on his table. I had time, standing there, to notice a number of things I would rather not have had time to notice. That my sleeve had gone heavy. That there was a woman in the second tier holding a child up to see, and had turned the child's face away. That the mist had burned off the top of the hill while I was on the floor and the light coming down into the circle had gone from

The Temple sealed the east study at nine o'clock that morning, which is three and a half hours faster than the Temple has done anything in living memory. I was not there. I was in a room above an apothecary on Cooper Street having eleven stitches put into my forearm by a woman who kept apologising, while Mara stood at her shoulder saying nothing and watching every single stitch go in. The woman with the needle asked me twice whether I wanted something for it and I said no both times, and I have thought since that this was vanity dressed as toughness. Mara let me have the vanity. She has known me long enough to know which of my refusals are worth arguing with. Freda came up the stairs at half past nine and told us. "Two officers and a boy with a hammer. Wax and cord across the door and across the window on the garden side, and a second seal on the side door with the latch, because somebody told them about the latch." She looked at me. "Your stepsister told them about the latch." A

ELEVEN O'CLOCK. SOLENE VALE. ASKED FOR THE SEAL. My stepmother. I want to describe the hall in the four seconds after the officer read that line, and I find that I cannot, because I was not in the hall. I was eleven years old, sitting in a corner of that study with my knees under my chin, being permitted to stay on condition that I did not speak, watching a woman with golden hair come in without knocking and my grandmother put down her pen. I had that memory. I have always had that memory. It had never once been about anything. That is the part I have not got over and I do not expect to. Not the betrayal. The filing. My grandmother sat in that chair with a woman standing in front of her asking for a thing she had no business asking for, and she did not argue, and she did not refuse in a way that would be remembered, and she did not warn anybody. She wrote it down in the book nobody knew about, in four words, and went on with her afternoon, and died before the month was out. She le