Page 98 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
“Come sit down for a minute,” I murmur.
“I can’t.”
“One minute, Lucas.”
He lets me draw him to the couch.
By the time the first light of day is creeping along the far ridge, I have made him a coffee in the small kitchen attached to the office and pressed it into his hands. He drinks half of it—without tasting it, I’m sure. Outside the window, the courtyardhas filled with men: twenty of them, stripped down, their kits in piles by the gravel driveway.
Lucas sets his cup down. “Go to bed, Sienna.”
I shake my head. “I’m staying right here with you.”
He looks at me sadly. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“Then it’ll be a long day.”
He swallows hard, but he doesn’t argue.
We walk outside together. On the front steps, the cold makes my breath catch again. Lucas notices and pulls me under his arm without a word, his palm warm on my hip through the silk. The men on the gravel are already shifting, fur rolling up over skin, the change rippling through the squadron in waves.
Twenty wolves, dark and lean, line up in formation in front of us. Reese, still in human form, lifts a hand to Lucas.
Lucas nods once.
The wolves turn as a unit and move. Fast, low, a dark current pouring down the drive, through the open gates, and into the trees beyond. Within thirty seconds, they are gone. The gates swing shut.
We stand there for a long time.
I tip my face up. Lucas is watching the tree line, his jaw set. I lean against his side and rest my cheek against his shoulder.
He exhales heavily, and his arm encircles me. He pulls me against him, and his head drops to the top of mine, his cheek pressed against my hair. I bring my arms around him and hold him there.
The sun edges over the eastern wall.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lucas
The clearing behind the estate has held the Silvercrest dead for four generations.
I know every stone in it. The first one I learned to read was my grandfather’s. The second was my mother’s. My father’s stone is set at the head of the eastern row, polished granite catching the afternoon sun, and I keep my eyes off it as I walk past because today is not about him.
Today is about Terrance.
His family is at the front. His mother is a small woman with gray at her temples, her hands knotted in a black handkerchief. She has not lifted her face since she arrived. His sister stands beside her with one arm wrapped around their mother’s shoulders, her jaw clenched as if that is the only sensation she can feel right now. Two younger brothers are behind them. A grandfather in a wheelchair, an old soldier who fought beside my father once, his hand resting on his knee.
I take my place at the head of the gravesite.
The other men from Bauer’s section are remembered with him. Fourteen names spoken into the air over an empty stretchof moss. Their bodies are still out there in the western buffer, still under whatever cover the squadron will have to fight through to bring them home, the absence of them in the ground its own wound. We bury what we have. We say what they were. We commit our brothers to the earth, the moon, the long memory of the pack.
I speak the rites.
My voice carries as an alpha’s voice should, and I’m grateful for the training my father drilled into me from the time I could read. The cadence comes without effort; the old words find their order. I look at each face in the family group as I name their son or brother or grandson. I do not let my voice waver.
I read the eulogy I wrote at five o’clock this morning.
Terrance was twenty-eight. He’d been with the task force for three years. He carried his sister on his shoulders at every pack festival until she grew too tall for it. He brought his mother flowers on the first Sunday of every month without fail. He volunteered for the worst patrol routes because he said the new recruits should not have to take them, and his commanding officers had stopped trying to argue with him about it.
