Page 238 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

My family used it for trips into town, harvest days, and rare visits to neighboring compounds. I used to pack apples in it, carefully wrapped in old cloth so they wouldn’t bruise before market. I carried it to the river when my aunts sent me to wash clothes. I dragged it down the hallway with shaking hands on the day I thought I was leaving to meet my Alpha.

The same day I learned I had been sold into the "Companionship Program" instead.

For a breath, the courtyard disappears beneath the memory of lemon fizz sweating in a pitcher, polished heels on our porch, and my father’s voice ordering me to collect my things.

The bag shifts.

A weathered hand tightens around the strap, knuckles pale with age and the cold. The thumbnail is split. There’s a scar across the thumb, an old white line from a logging accident I used to hear about whenever he wanted sympathy at dinner and to avoid washing dishes.

The world narrows to that hand, and then the man holding the bag turns his head.

There stands my father.

Wind gusts through the courtyard, and now that I'm focusing, I can smell a familiar scent that haunted my childhood and adolescence. Tree sap and misery.

For years, his control over me made him larger than everyone around him. A booming laugh on the porch for everyone but me, a cruel sneer on his face as he denied me education and basic rights, his disdain for my very existence other than fetching him a fat payday.

The man in front of me is smaller than that. Maybe I made him larger in my memory.

His shoulders have narrowed beneath a threadbare coat. Gray is streaked through his beard. The old charm is still there, tucked into the slant of his mouth and the careful lift of his brows, but it looks worn thin now. Like a tool he has used too many times, and now it's failing.

The moment his eyes lock onto mine, the color drains from his face.

The hand around that old bag tightens until the rope creaks. His gaze flicks over me, taking in my coat, my boots, and the soldiers who respectfully dip their heads when they pass.

There is no surprise in his plain brown Beta eyes. He has been living in Blackgate for weeks, which means he knew I was here and chose not to approach me because he remembers exactly what he did.

The courtyard noise thins around me until all I hear is the scrape of a pen across a contract.

The dry whisper of pages turning beneath Official Gould’s manicured nails while my father stood beside her, smiling like the world had finally given him what he was owed.

I smell lemon fizz, left sitting in the sun to go sour in the hot weather.

I feel porch boards beneath my feet, rough through the thin soles of my second-hand sneakers. My skin is still raw from my first heat spent locked in a shed without anything but a bare mattress and a ratty old blanket.

Defective.

The word comes back with teeth.

I remember the way my father’s face changed when he saw the compensation figure. First shock, then hunger, then delight he didn’t bother to hide from me.

Twenty-one years of obedience bought and sold in less time than it took me to pack a bag.

Go collect your things.

Then the Beta assistant had pressed a phone into my hand and whispered directions to sanctuary.

I remember the truck door screaming open.

My hands shaking around the key.

My father’s voice tearing after me as I drove away.

Halley! Halley! Halley!

I blink, and Blackgate comes back.

Cold stone instead of porch boards. Mountain air instead of summer dust. Soldiers instead of officials. Viper’s scent in the courtyard, woven through leather and snow.