Chapter 6: Dead Weight

Doran's POV

The third woman was out of my bed by four in the morning, and I had not touched her.

I lay on my back in the gray light and listened to her heels on the stairs, quick and relieved.

She had sat on the edge of the mattress at eleven and said, "Ambrose said you'd want company."

Her voice wanted very much to be somewhere else.

I had said, "Stay, if you like."

She had stayed four hours, rigid on her side of the bed, and neither of us had slept.

My body would not do it.

It would not do it for the first one in her green coat, or for the second on Monday, or for this one.

I lay with my hands open at my sides and my wolf pacing in my chest, low and furious, wanting something that was not in that room.

Ambrose had said it would pass.

He had said a man who turns a girl out in public has to prove to the pack that he is whole.

He had said the proof was to take another woman to bed, and another, until the first one faded.

I had believed him because I wanted to.

I had stood in that loft and rejected Rhiannon Etheridge in front of two hundred wolves.

I had said the old words to a woman in her mother's too-small dress, and I had not looked at her once.

I had told myself it was the only way.

If I had taken her as mine with Ambrose watching and the council listening, he would have used her against me by the new moon.

She was an Etheridge, from the poorest family on the Reach, with a father who gambled and a mother who flinched.

She had nothing behind her but her own two hands.

I would rather she hated me than be a lever in my cousin's fist, and I had thought I could carry that.

I had not known what her silence would do to me.

I had waited for her answer in that loft, and I had been afraid to hear it.

She never gave it.

She went to Hester's book instead, picked up the pen and wrote her own terms.

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