All Chapters of He Threw Me Away Once, This Time I Choose the Lycan prince: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

FREYA'S POVThe fire cracked.Everybody looked at me.My mother. My father. Kade. Dr. Ewan. Corin Vance at the back with his hat in his hands."Told them what?" my mother said.I sat there with my hands in my lap and my mouth shut."Freya," Dr. Ewan said. "They've earned it. They've been in the water and in the trench and in the dark and they've asked for nothing but the truth. Give it to them."I looked at my mother."I died," I said.She didn't move."I died in a hospital ward when I was thirty-four years old," I said. "I had white hair and I couldn't shift and I had been sedated for three years and I had two children who were dead and a husband who had thrown me away and a woman who had taken my place and I died screaming for children nobody believed existed." I breathed, feeling like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. "And then I woke up in a pool at Lincoln Prep and I was seventeen years old and I had a second chance."I remember everything," I said. "I remember the marri

FREYA'S POVWe took him into the small parlour and shut the door.My mother brought the tea herself and put it down hard enough to rattle and stood by the window with her arms folded and did not leave.Ashbourne sat in the chair nearest the fire and took his hat off and put it on the floor beside him, and looked round the room at the paintings and the clock and the good carpet, and then at Ronan, who had not sat down."Your mother was a Moonrock," he said without preamble.Ronan's chin came up. "My mother was a Redwood servant.""Your mother was a Moonrock." Ashbourne picked up his cup. "Her name was Ilse. She was nineteen and she was a second cousin to the last Moonrock Alpha. She was sent south the week the raids started, and she went into service under a false name, and she was already carrying when she went." He drank. "That's not a guess. That's a parish record and a hiring book and a woman in Whitby who's still alive and remembers a girl called Ilse with a Moonrock accent and a b

FREYA'S POVMarissa had her coat half off and her hand still on the door and she was smiling, and the smile was for Kade and it was the smile of a woman who had come home to a house with the fires out."Ask her what?" she said.Kade didn't answer her. He was looking at me with his jaw set and his eyes doing the thing they did when he'd already decided and hated it."Freya," he said. "Ask her.""Mrs. Redwood," I said. "Did you know your husband was up at that house the week my nanny died?"Marissa's coat came off her shoulder and she hung it up, taking her time."Ellis told you," she said."He told me he was there. He told me about the step and the ring.""Then you know as much as I do." She turned and I got the odd sense that she wasn’t telling me the truth. "I found out tonight, same as you.""You found out tonight that your husband was there. You've known for sixteen years that something happened but you never asked."An emotion passed through her face. It was gone before I could pu

FREYA'S POVHe failed again at eight twenty-nine.It was worse than the first time because the first time had been noise and this one was quiet. A ripple ran down him and got as far as his hips and died there, and he folded slowly sideways into the drain and lay with his arm over his face."Eight twenty-nine," the thin man said."Say the time again," my mother said. "It's the only thing you've said all night.""Eight twenty-nine, Mrs. Everhart, and he's had three goes at it and he's down each time.""He's got thirty-one minutes."Ronan's breath was going in and out of him in short tearing pulls and his arm was over his eyes and his ribs were showing with every one.He's going to fail.I could feel it in my own chest, the flat certainty of it, the way you know a thing before it happens. I had lain in a ward and watched a monitor and known, and there is a particular sick stillness that comes over you when you stop hoping and start calculating how bad it will be."Ronan," I said.He didn

RONAN'S POVThe wall was real. That was the thing nobody could get their head round, and I couldn't explain it, so I stopped trying.It was in my back, low, between the shoulder blades and the hips, and it was like a door with the key on the wrong side. Everything I had went at it and the door took the weight and gave nothing back.Three times I put my whole self at it and three times it held and the noise came out of me instead and I ended up on the stones with my arm over my face because I couldn't stand the six of them looking.I've been looked at my whole life. That's the part people don't understand. Being looked at isn't new. But the difference between a man looking at a bastard and thinking there he goes and a man looking at a bastard and thinking is that all there is.That’s how that man was looking at me and I hated it.I'd been sick twice and there was drain water in my mouth and I could hear my own breath going and every time I looked up there were coats. Coats that cost mo