My Sister Sat at My Groom's Feet, So I Took His Whole Pack novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Morning

Reuben's POV

I woke before she did, which is a habit of the tower, and I lay still and let myself have it.

Lucinda Sooy was asleep in my bed with her braid half undone across my chest and one bare leg thrown over mine.

The sun came flat and gold through the window, and it lit the freckles on her shoulder.

I had not slept past dawn in a year.

I looked at the door and saw the tally stick.

Three notches and a loop of red thread hung from my nail, left by a hand I never heard.

I knew what it was.

I knew the Boom Wives had walked up to a Stray's door and touched it.

Nobody had done that in my life.

The stick meant they had decided I was part of the matter.

I could have lain there and been afraid of that.

Instead I thought about the three nights in September.

I had been on the fire line along the Sooy bog's east edge, checking the break.

A gold pickup had sat outside the little cottage behind the pump house with its lights off.

It was the Alpha's truck.

The cottage was the younger sister's.

I knew it, because I had delivered cedar there in the spring and she had given me a glass of tea.

Three nights, and every time the truck left before four.

I did not say one word to anyone.

A Stray who speaks against an Alpha is run off the Barrens, and the fire lines go unwatched, and the pines burn for everyone.

That was the reason I gave myself.

I told myself the Sooys would hear it from someone who loved them.

Then I stood on the wrong side of a dike yesterday and watched Lucinda go into the water in her grandmother's dress.

I understood that nobody had told her.

I would have to tell her.

Not now, and not today.

She stirred against me.

"Reuben," she said into my skin, in a voice rough with sleep.

"Morning."

Her eyes opened, hazel, with the berry-colored smudge of last night's tears still under one of them.

She looked at the stick on the door, and then at me.

"They hung it while we slept," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"You didn't hear."

"I hear everything. I didn't hear that."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You said till morning," she said.

"I did," I said.

"It's morning."

"It is."

"And the truck's mine," she said.

"The keys are on the hook. Take it where you like."

I made myself say it plainly, with my hands still on the quilt, because I had promised.

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at me for a long time.

Her braid fell across her bare breast.

"You're not going to ask me to stay," she said.

"No," I said.

"You're not going to ask me for after."

"No."

"Why not?" she said.

"Because I'd want you to say yes," I said. "And I don't want a yes you give me because you have nowhere to go."

She looked at me, and something in her face opened.

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