Claimed by the Alpha I Hate novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Quilt

On the night of the vigil Jarek and Brida come to demand she leave, and her mother's quilt is waiting on the guest bed.

The Ridgeback lodge was a long log house with a stone chimney and a hall big enough for two hundred.

We set my mother's coffin on trestles by the fire, and Nolan lit one candle at its head.

He did it with a kitchen match, and he did it as if he had done it a hundred times for strangers.

Then he went to the kitchen, and I heard pans.

I stood by the coffin and told my mother the truth.

"I'm in his house," I said.

"You'd think that was funny."

She would have.

She had a laugh that came out as a wheeze at the end, and I wanted to hear it badly enough that my eyes stung.

"Dinner," said Nolan from the doorway.

He held two bowls of something brown.

"It's stew," he said.

"Sit.

"It's supposed to be stew."

I sat at the long table and tasted it.

"What did you do to the carrots?"

"I boiled them."

"For how long?"

"Until I stopped being afraid of them."

I put down my spoon.

"The Alpha of Ridgeback can't cook."

"The Alpha of Ridgeback grew up in the Council's orphan hall," he said.

"Everybody there took turns cooking, and I took my turn the way you take a vaccine."

I did not laugh.

I made a small noise through my nose, which was close.

"One rule," I said.

"Anything but that night.

"If you say one word about the circle, I'm going to sleep in the truck."

"Then we'll talk about the stew."

"The stew is a crime."

"It's the only one I've committed this week," he said.

Then he looked at his bowl.

Someone knocked at the front door, three hard knocks, then a fourth that was more of a kick.

Nolan did not get up.

"Don't answer that," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I know the knock."

I got up anyway.

I opened the door, and the cold came in with a smell of expensive perfume.

Brida Fitch stood on the porch in a white wool coat.

The silver daisy hung at her throat.

Jarek stood a step behind her, and I almost did not know him.

His leather jacket hung off his shoulders, his face was the color of dishwater, and his hand shook on the porch rail.

Six or seven pack members stood in the yard behind them, holding phones.

"A broken wolf under the Alpha's roof," said Brida.

"It's not allowed."

"It's one night," I said.

"There's a coffin by the fire."

"You can mourn in the barn."

She smiled the old smile.

"You were always happiest with the animals, Pennick scrap."

Something in my chest went very quiet.

I had thought about this moment for two years in a hundred different ways.

In none of them had I been tired enough to be funny.

"Brida," I said, "you look wonderful.

"Has anyone told you that necklace goes with everything except your face?"

Someone in the yard snorted.

Brida's smile stayed exactly where it was, but her eyes didn't.

"Jarek," she said.

Jarek cleared his throat.

"The Pennick woman has no right to sleep in this house.

"The old law says."

"The old law says the family keeps vigil," said Nolan.

He had come up behind me without a sound.

He did not touch me, and he did not raise his voice.

He stood in the doorway with his coat off and his sleeves rolled, and the whole porch got smaller.

"Jarek, you wrote half of that law and you know it.

"Go home."

"This is my pack," Jarek said.

It came out thin.

Nolan made a sound in his chest, low and short, and it was not a word.

I felt it in my ribs from where I stood.

Every phone in the yard went dark at once.

Brida took a step back, and her hand went to the pendant.

"This isn't over," she said, and she steered Jarek down the steps by his sleeve.

When they were gone, I found that I was holding the door frame hard enough to hurt.

"I had that," I said.

"I know."

"I did not need you to growl."

"I know," he said.

"I didn't say a word.

"That was my stomach."

I looked at him.

He looked back, perfectly serious, and I shut the door so he would not see me smile.

The guest room was at the top of the stairs.

It had a pine bed, a small lamp, and a quilt folded across the foot.

I stopped in the doorway.

It was a blue and yellow quilt in a pattern of daisies, and one corner was patched with a scrap of a red flannel shirt.

I had slept under it every winter of my life.

It had been in our cottage on the night we were thrown out, and I had never seen it again.

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