Chapter 37. Forty Boys at a Border Fight

Weston's POV

My father was waiting for me in the small study at eleven, an hour after the Guard trucks came in, as if it were any other morning. Black coffee. The papers from four states. And no tonic on the sideboard anymore; just an empty silver cover, like a hat on an empty chair.

He didn't look up when I came in.

"You've been in the west," he said. "Then at Cedar Run. Sitting in the rain outside a farm gate for seventeen hours, I'm told, like a dog. The whole Eastern Packs are laughing."

"Let them."

"They'll stop laughing when you're king. That's the only consolation." He turned a page. "Sit down."

I didn't sit down.

"I was in the valley," I said. "The Unclaimed. I saw the town. The schoolhouse. The mill. A