Chose Your SIL's Pup Over Ours and Left Me to Freeze, Now Meet the Luna Who Erased Your All novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ten Below
In labour at the moot, Rhea is ordered into the frost cell by her mate so his brother's widow can whelp first, and she rejects him aloud in front of the pack. Then Lenore's labour horn sounds hours early, the guard leaves, and her waters break with nobody there.
My mate had me thrown into the frost cell with my first contraction still in my back, in front of the whole pack.
Two hundred wolves stood in the pack hall and watched him do it.
I was nine months pregnant, and the pains had started an hour before the moot.
I hadn't told anyone yet.
Then Garrick stood on the dais, read the old law aloud, and I didn't have to.
"The firstborn male pup of the Wycliffe line takes everything," he said. "Rank. Land. The Alpha seat."
His brother's widow sat in the front row in black, one hand on her belly.
She was due at sunrise.
I was due the sunrise after.
"My brother's pup must be born first," Garrick said. "So my mate's labour will wait."
Nobody in the hall moved.
Our old healer stepped out of the crowd with her satchel against her chest.
"Alpha, a labouring wolf can't be held back by cold. The cold will only hurt her and the pup."
"The elders say it holds a whelping until the moon turns," Garrick said.
"The elders say a lot of things."
"Hester Quill. Sit down."
She sat.
Garrick looked at me, finally.
His eyes were the same grey they'd been the night he marked me.
"It's only until sunrise, Rhea. Walk down with the guards."
A pain pulled across my back, and I put my hand on the pillar to stay standing.
I had known this man for six years.
I had slept beside him for three.
I had held his hand at his brother's burial five months ago, when he couldn't hold his own up.
Now he stood there and waited for me to obey.
I could have begged.
I could have told him my pup was coming now, tonight, and that the frost cell under this hall was ten below and made for rogue wolves.
He knew all of that.
He had read it out himself.
So I let go of the pillar and stood up straight.
"Garrick Wycliffe," I said, loud enough for the back wall. "I reject you as my mate and as my Alpha."
The hall went silent.
"Rhea," he said.
"I reject you before this pack and under this roof."
The bond tore out of my chest.
It hurt worse than the contraction, and I did not make a sound.
Garrick gripped the edge of the dais, and his face went grey.
"It doesn't change the cell," he said.
"I know," I said. "It changes who's sending me to it."
So I rejected him, and then I walked down to the cell on my own feet.
The guards took my arms at the bottom anyway.
The cell was a stone room with an iron door and a slit window near the ceiling.
There was no bed and no stove.
My breath came out white.
They took my boots, which was the rule for rogues, and shut the door.
The lock turned.
I slid down the wall and sat on stone so cold it burned.
Another pain came, and I breathed through it, teeth clenched.
I took my coat out from under me and found the little cord in the pocket.
It was a wristband, braided from my own dark red hair.
Every pup in Ironbark wears one from the first day, braided from his mother's hair.
I had finished it last week.
I held it in my fist and said, to the belly, "Not yet. Please, not yet."
The lock turned again.
It was Lenore.
She came in alone, in black, with a flask under one arm and her own fur-lined coat over the other.
The guard let her in and went back to the stairs.
"Oh, Rhea." Her eyes were wet. "I begged him not to. I'm so sorry."
She wrapped her coat around my shoulders, and it was still warm from her body.
"Drink this. It's tea, with honey. Hester doesn't know I brought it."
"Thank you," I said.
My hands shook too hard to take the cap off, so she did it for me.
I drank, and it was hot and sweet.
I could have cried at how kind that was.
"It's only until my pup comes," she said. "He promised me. Sunrise, and you'll be out and warm."
"Sunrise," I said.
She saw the cord in my fist.
"That's lovely," she said. "Red, like your hair."
"It's for him."
"Hester said it's a boy. Is that right?"
"That's right."
"A boy," Lenore said again, softly, and smiled.
She squeezed my shoulder and went up the stairs.
I sat with her coat around me and finished the tea, and the pains came faster.
Some time after midnight, a horn sounded above me.
It was the pack horn, three long notes, the one for a whelping.
But Lenore wasn't due for hours.
Boots ran over my head.
The guard on the stairs shouted, and then his feet were gone too.
Heat poured down my legs.
My waters broke on the stone floor, and nobody was left in the whole hall to hear it.
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