My Alpha Mate Secretly Got My Sister Pregnant novel · Chapter 2 of 48

Chapter 2: Not Charming Enough

Brynn refuses to run, so Garrett tells the whole hall why he replaced her, and ends by promising to reject her at the Moon Stone tomorrow night.

Nobody in the hall moved.

A hundred and forty wolves waited to see if I would cry and run.

I wanted to.

My wolf was pressed flat inside me with her ears back.

I bent down, reached under the next table, and picked up my lab report.

A young warrior pulled his boots back out of my way.

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

Then I walked back to my chair at the high table and sat down in it.

"Brynn," my father said through his teeth.

"I'm the Luna of this pack," I said. "This is the Luna's feast. I'm not leaving it."

Garrett let go of Lacey's hand.

For a second I thought he might come to me.

Instead he picked up his glass and turned to the hall, the way he did at pack meetings.

"Fine," he said. "Then everyone can hear it."

He walked slowly behind the high table.

He passed behind my chair and didn't touch it.

"Two years ago I marked Brynn Corwin at the Moon Stone. You were all there."

Heads nodded.

"I gave her the pendant. I gave her the Luna's house. I gave her my name in front of the Council."

He had not given me his name.

I had kept Corwin because I liked it, and he'd said it didn't matter.

"And for two years," Garrett said, "this pack has waited for an heir."

"We know," someone called from the back.

A few people laughed.

"Every Alpha in Montana has asked me about it," Garrett said. "Every Council meeting. When's the pup, Rhodes? Is the Beta's girl sick?"

His mother nodded along at the end of the table.

"A pack without an heir is a pack the others start circling," Garrett said. "You know that. Ironpine knows it. They watch our side of the river every night."

"That's true," his mother said. "Garrett's father would never have waited this long."

Garrett set his hand on Lacey's shoulder.

"Lacey came to me in the spring. She was worried for her sister, and worried for the pack."

Lacey dropped her eyes.

"One thing led to another," Garrett said. "I'm not proud of how. But the Moon Goddess gave this pack a pup."

The hall clapped.

Not everyone.

But enough.

"In the spring," I said.

Garrett's jaw moved.

"When in the spring, Garrett?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

Lacey lifted her chin and answered before he could.

"Your birthday," she said quietly. "You'd gone to bed early. You always go to bed early, Brynn."

I remembered that night.

The cake Lacey baked for me.

Garrett kissing my forehead and saying he'd lock up the hall.

I had fallen asleep happy.

Something went cold and hard at the bottom of my chest and stayed there.

"You were in my house," I said. "On my birthday."

"It was never really your house," Lacey said.

She said it gently.

"You were never warm with the pack, Brynn. You were always at that hospital. Night shifts, weekends. The pups didn't know you. The elders didn't like you."

She looked out at the tables and smiled sadly.

"You were never charming enough to be Luna. Everyone knows it. They were just too kind to say."

Nobody told her she was wrong.

I looked down the tables, at the faces I had stitched and splinted and sat up with in my own kitchen.

The warrior whose arm I'd set at three in the morning.

The elder whose heart medicine I'd driven to his house in a snowstorm.

He was looking at his hands.

My mother still had not lifted her eyes from her plate.

"Mom," I said.

She picked up her fork.

She put it down again.

She didn't look up.

Garrett held out his hand toward me, palm up.

"The pendant, Brynn."

My hand went to the pendant by itself.

It sat warm against my collarbone, a gold crescent, with the garnet in it.

Garrett's grandmother had worn it. Then his mother. Then me.

"Give it to me, and you can walk out of here with some dignity," he said.

I thought about the paper in my pocket.

About the eight-week thing inside me that nobody in this hall believed in.

If I took the pendant off here, at this table, it would go around Lacey's neck before dessert.

"No," I said.

The hall murmured.

"The pendant comes off at the rite," I said. "That's the law. You marked me at the Moon Stone. If you want me gone, you do it there."

Garrett's gray eyes went flat.

His mother hissed something to him I couldn't hear.

Lacey's hand curled on the tablecloth.

"You'd make the whole pack climb the ridge to watch you lose?" my father said.

"You all climbed it to watch me win."

Garrett set his glass down.

He leaned down beside my chair, close enough that only I could see his face.

He smiled for the room.

"You never could just let a thing go quietly," he said softly.

Then he straightened up and spoke to everyone.

"Then tomorrow night, at the Moon Stone, I reject you in front of everyone."

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