Chapter 7: The Cream Envelopes

The palace study smelled of pine and old paper.

A maid brought me a robe and took away the wedding dress, and I was glad to see it go.

Then the King and I sat on opposite sides of a long oak desk, and neither of us touched the tea.

"You said letters," I said. "I have never had a letter from you."

"I know."

He opened a drawer and set a thin stack of cream envelopes on the desk.

They were the same cream as the one Father had pocketed on our porch.

"These are the Registry copies," he said. "Do you know what the Mate Rite is, Miss Ashworth?"

"Every wolf is entered at twenty-one. Most of it is paperwork."

"Most of it is. Sometimes the Rite names a match."

He turned the top page toward me.

"Six years ago, the month you turned twenty-one, it named one for you."

I looked at the page.

At the top, in the Registry's careful hand, was my name.

Beside it was his.

"Your match is the King of Westland?" I asked.

My voice sounded like someone else's.

"The Rite does not care about rank. It cared about you."

"I don't believe you."

"You smelled me in the hall," he said quietly. "You thought nobody saw your hands."

I looked down at them. They were warm, still.

"I have never shifted," I said. "The healers said I was a late bloomer."

"A wolf that does not wake is sometimes waiting," he said. "Yours woke today."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Chose My Sister, But Now He Wants Me Back from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.