Given to an Alpha Who Saw Through Every Lie novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Poisoned at her best friend's party, Nan wakes in the clinic, fakes amnesia, and watches her fiancé give her to the Alpha. The Alpha tells her to keep lying, but never to him.
Regan Rycroft put the wine in my hand herself, and she was smiling when she did it.
It was her twenty-fourth birthday, and the whole wolf pack had crowded into her uncle's lodge to sing for her.
"Drink up, Nannie," she said. "I picked the red just for you."
"You're the best," I told her, and I meant it. I had meant it since we were six.
Colt came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder.
"She's been on her feet since noon," he told Regan. "Make her sit."
My fiancé smelled like pine soap and, faintly, like Regan's perfume.
I told myself it was the hug at the door.
Across the room, our Alpha stood against the wall with a glass of water.
He did that at every pack party. The second I walked toward him, he set the glass down and left.
By the fireplace, Colt's father lifted his mug to me.
He was the Beta of our pack, and he had been my guardian since my parents died when I was twelve. His name was Ernest.
He had also handed me a thermos of his herbal tea every morning since then, for my nerves, and I had drunk some that morning too.
Regan tapped her glass against mine.
"To best friends," she said.
The wine was bitter. I made a face, and she laughed and said it was a dry one.
Then my throat caught fire.
I heard glass break. I heard someone shout my name from somewhere far off.
The last thing I saw was the Alpha, who was suddenly in the middle of the room and not by the wall.
I woke in the pack clinic with my throat raw and my head swimming.
The pack healer, Carrie, was bent over my IV. Colt sat in the chair beside the bed with his hands between his knees.
"Nan," Carrie said. "Do you know where you are?"
My mouth was so dry I could barely shape the words.
"The clinic," I said. "I think I'm still drunk. Carrie, I can't remember my own name."
I meant it as a joke. I was only trying to make someone laugh.
Carrie didn't laugh.
Colt didn't laugh either, and he didn't take my hand.
He went very still and looked at me for what felt like a long time.
Then he said, "Excuse me," and walked out into the hallway.
The door didn't latch behind him. I had spent four years at the front desk of this clinic, and I knew that door never did.
"Is she awake?" Regan's voice was a whisper, and it was close.
"She says she doesn't know her own name," Colt said.
"She's lying."
"Maybe. Or the wolfsbane cooked her head." He let out a short laugh. "Either way, Del, it's perfect. Nobody asks who handed her the glass if she can't say it."
"Then get rid of her before she remembers."
"I'm going to. Give me ten minutes."
I lay very still, and I understood that I was not dying.
I was being cleaned up.
Carrie was watching my face. I kept it empty.
There had been wolfsbane in my glass, a dose that would put down any wolf in the pack. I didn't even have a wolf, and I was alive anyway.
The hallway filled with voices. Elders, a few pack members who had followed the ambulance, and then Colt's voice, raised so everyone could hear.
"Alpha. Nan has no memory, no wolf and no family but my father, and he's sent me to speak for him."
I lifted my head enough to see through the gap.
Colt stood in the hall with his shoulders back, playing the grieving fiancé for a crowd.
"Under the Ward Law, I give her into your house until her mind is sound. I release our engagement. I can't be bound to someone who doesn't know me."
Nobody spoke.
I thought about saying it right then: Regan poisoned me, and he knows. I thought about what happens to a wolfless girl who accuses the Beta's son with no proof, and nobody to stand behind her.
So I stayed on the pillow, and I kept pretending.
"Accepted," said Dane Hargrove, our Alpha.
He came in alone and shut the door on the hallway. He was six foot three and the room seemed to get smaller around him.
I had never heard him say more than ten words to me in my life.
He stopped beside the bed and looked down at me. His eyes were amber and they did not blink.
"Nan," he said.
I looked back at him, blank, the way I had been doing for the last few minutes.
He bent until his mouth was by my ear, and his voice dropped so low that Carrie could not have heard it.
"Your heart jumped on every word you said to Colt," he said. "You know your name. Lie to the whole pack if you like. Don't ever lie to me."
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