The Alpha Heir’s Candle Game Chapter 06
The Fabric
I knew that voice better than my own.
“What a coincidence. The Alpha heir came into town with me to buy winter coats for the outer families. I didn’t think we’d run into you.”
Clara. Careful. Sweet. Explaining nothing anyone had asked her to explain.
I turned around.
Ethan stood a step behind her. Tall in his dark coat. Clara at his side in soft grey and pink, her hand tucked into the crook of his arm.
I looked away. I turned back to the counter. I did not want to speak to him.
Ethan’s hand came down on the bolt of pale grey wool. My mother’s bolt.
“Not a bad choice.” He didn’t look at me. “Clara, you’re due a new cloak. This wool would suit you.”
My mother’s fingers closed hard on my sleeve. “Alpha heir, forgive me, but we chose that fabric first. My daughter is trying to…”
“Mother.” I squeezed her hand. “Let it go. If the Alpha heir wants it, let him have it.”
Ethan had never once in his life waited his turn.
Arguing with him was throwing rocks at the moon.
I bowed my head just enough. “Forgive us, Alpha heir. My mother is still weak from her illness. She didn’t mean to speak out of turn.”
His knuckles on the bolt of wool went white.
I hurried my mother out of the shop before she could say anything else. I didn’t want her punished on my account.
Behind us, through the open door, I heard his voice again. Gentler than I’d ever heard it in my life. “Clara, love. Look around. Pick anything you want. Anything at all. I’ll buy it for you today.”
My mother’s grip on my arm went tight and shaking.
“That soft.” Her voice was low. Furious. “So he can be that soft, and it just wasn’t for you. Ten years he was your whole sky. Was any of it real, Jade?”
I thought of the winter he’d knelt outside the Pack Alpha’s study for two days and one night in the rain.
The thirty lashes he’d taken off my back by breaking his own health for it.
His fever.
His laugh.
His thumb wiping my tears.
“Don’t cry, Jade. With me around, you never have to follow the dumb rules.”
The pup I had loved had been real once.
The Alpha heir in that shop was somebody else.
I smiled at my mother. I didn’t answer her.
Two more days. Two more days and I would never have to see Ethan Blackwell again.
Whether it had been real or not stopped mattering the moment he’d said strip her.