Torn Between Enemy Alphas

Chapter 18- Gone

Alice didn't go straight back down to the Banquet Hall. While she felt a tiny bit better after meeting with Luna Emery, the last twenty-four hours had been overwhelming and she almost felt as if she needed to catch her breath.

Wiping the palms of her hands on the skirt of her dress, she headed away from the Pack's main offices', not wanting to chance running into anyone at that moment. She didn't really think that anyone would be there, not with everything going on that morning, but she really didn't feel like chancing it. She just didn't want to get into a conversation about what had happened and what she thought the outcome of the hearing was going to be, especially if one of Lane's assistants did happen to come in, or even worse, if he decided he needed something from his office.  Instead she headed further into the lesser used parts of the Pack House making her way down the old, winding corridors. 

Nearly a decade earlier, after the attack, the pack had gotten together and raised the funds for a new library. It was an addition on the ground floor and it was enormous, with state of the art technology, and it had at least fifty times more books than the old library. They hadn't even moved most of the books from the old library over.

But the old library was still there, up on the third floor, and hardly anyone ever went into it. A few elderly women still used it to read and they had their own book club, along with a quilting club, but other than that it was usually empty. And so just as Alice expected, she had the place to herself.

She moved silently to an old, overstuffed chair at the very back of the library, behind rows and rows of books, sinking into the deep blue velvet of the seat that she had come to think of as her own. The book she had left on the small table beside her seat, the last time she had been there was still sitting there, exactly as she had left it.

She picked up the leather bound tome and ran her fingers over the cover, but she didn't open it just yet. Alice wasn't really here to read, not really. She'd come to the library to sit, and breathe, and quiet her mind, if she could. She wasn't really sure if that was possible, but she thought that if it was, this was the place, at least indoors, where it might happen. Because she was fairly certain that no one was going to let her go for a run, which would have been her first choice to calm her mind.

No one had officially announced it, but she knew that they would be conducting this meeting in the Pack's Council Chambers, which at times doubled as a courtroom. It was a large room, but not nearly as large as the Banquet Hall, and a shudder passed through Alice's body as she thought about what it might be like. It sometimes seemed as if very little good came out of that place. The Amber Moon Pack's Council was headed by Alpha Cadman and had a half dozen members, five male and one female.

Alice had never really been sure how much say any of the other Council members had, and really, none of the decisions they made had ever affected her personally, but whenever they met someone seemed to come out the worse for it, and so whenever the Council Chambers were in use, the Pack was on edge. But today was different. Today the people meeting inside those walls weren't the Pack's own Council members, Alice reminded herself. Today it would be members of the King's Council making the decisions and the King's Council was known for being fair and just.

For some reason there was a hard pit of fear in her stomach that wouldn't settle. Putting down the book without opening it, Alice paced to one of the windows and stared out at the forest, leaning so close that her nose touched the glass. Her heart ached in her chest at the idea of leaving this place and never coming back. She had always imagined leaving, that was true, but if she left now, on these terms, she wouldn't be welcome back as long as Alpha Cadman was alive. That meant more than just giving up her pack because she'd found a mate somewhere else. She would be effectively banished.