Malcolm was nearly to his horse, but I didn't wait for him to leave. I ran for my cottage, too low to be embarrassed, slamming the door behind me and feeling it shake on the hinges. I pinched my lips tight as my body started to jerk. My eyes squeezed shut, the ache of the pressure a distracting relief. But as the sound of horse hooves receded, I unleashed myself. A dark sob tore free of my throat, clawing through me as it escaped. I staggered toward the table at the center of the room but couldn't make it into the chair before my knees gave way. My fingernails dug into the wood grain as my mouth opened on a wail, a long, mourning sound for the love I'd lost, over and over again. The love Malcolm had fooled out of me once, twice, three times.
And the love I had cultivated in my most heartsore moments, the love that had grown in me, the love I could never bury or run from but must carry without a source, just the memory of an idea of the child I'd carried too briefly.
The child I'd sworn to bring into the world, and then failed. I wept for him and for myself, and vowed a single, certain thing.
I would not go back to Malcolm Barr.
Chapter Two
TORION
The air was thick with rich incense, but it mingled with another fragrance, sour and heavy and uncomfortably sweet—the rot of death shrouded in ceremony. My eyes were sore, fixed on the still figure in the bed, covered to his chest in a white sheet, body limp and sagging. My father had beenalllife, all movement, all laughter. Was I sitting vigil at his side, waiting for some hint of him to return, or reconciling myself with his absence? He'd been gone for hours now. This body, all that remained of him, bore no resemblance to the man I'd loved, respected…and sometimes resented.
A knock thudded softly at the door frame, and I moved slowly, taking in the massive figure that waited just outside my father's room. Waited and did not enter, because another alpha was not permitted at the deathbed of one so recently departed.
"You should've slept," Seamus de Roche, Alpha of the Craven Sea, called to me from the hall.
I braced my hands on the arms of the chair and lifted my stiff body from its seat, swallowing the groan as my limbs and muscles resisted movement after so long in one place. I didn't need to prove him right.
"I'm sure I slept some," I said, my mouth dry and words cracking.
Seamus turned for the stairs, leaving room between us as I followed him, shutting the door to my father's suite behind me. It was too early for dawn and the hall was dark, but the candles by my father's bedside had burned out sometime in the night and my eyes were already adjusted. And I knew these halls well, knew the uneven trip of the steps down from the tower, knew the feel of the stone that grazed under my trailing fingertips.
"You don't have to do this, you know. You could buy a boat, join my fleet," Seamus said, wearing a half-hearted smile. He already knew my answer.
I'd spent a fair amount of time on the sea with my friend, avoiding my father's rut cycle with an extended stay on Seamus's ship, visiting as emissary and for fun. It would be an easier life to sail the sea under Seamus's rule than to try and establish my own here in Grave Hills. But this was my home, and while time with Seamus had always been enjoyable, there was still that slight pressure, the faint chafing, of beingbelowsomeone. Seamus might offer me freedom on the sea, but he wouldn't step aside and let me rise as alpha in his stead.
This was my chance.
It could only have arrived on the heels of my father's death.
Seamus was right. I should've slept.
"Don't waste your breath turning me down," Seamus said as we reached the second story of the keep, the balcony that overlooked the great hall and front doors.
"It's more tempting than you might realize," I admitted.
"But it's not rising as alpha," Seamus said with a shrug. "I wouldn't give it up, either."
I nodded, even though in truth, I had no idea what it would mean, what it would feel like. I only knew that for decades now, my body had seemed too small, too tight; that I'd been stampingdown the instinct to snarl at my father, to snap and challenge him. I loved him, loved the memories of him from my childhood, the gentle smiling man who had one arm around me and one around my mother, but as the years had passed and I'd grown, my love had been sprinkled with frustrations and the urge to push him forward or out of my way entirely.
The sorrow of his passing, so deep I already felt buried even before his grave had been dug, was tempered with an eager relief. Finally, there was room for me. I only had to claim it.
"Do you think I can do it?" The words appeared on my lips before I could stifle them, further proof that I'd spent the night sitting vigil and stuck in my head when I should've been resting and preparing for the battle to come.
Seamus clapped his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the stairs. "Only you can decide that. But for what it's worth, I think you'd make a good alpha. So does Cadogan. Worthington has said the same. When you rise, you'll have us in your corner."
When I rise.
I nodded and straightened, leading the way down the stairs, stopping at a familiar old face as it exited the kitchen. "Get me water and coffee."
"Yes, milord, and breakfast?" the old woman asked.
I shook my head, not sure I'd be able to keep food down this morning. Certainly not in the fight to come.
Seamus cleared his throat. "Speak for yourself. I'll take a heap of breakfast." I glared at him, and he only grinned. "A good alpha is generous to his guests, my friend."
I rolled my eyes and found an open spot between tables to do my morning stretches, ignoring the alpha's lazy, large frame as he dropped into a chair by the fire.
