The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Brides Die

I didn't sleep in that bed.

I sat up the rest of the night in my mother's armchair with the lamp on and her old fireplace poker across my knees.

At eight in the morning I drove up to Greywater with the veil in a grocery bag.

The council was at breakfast.

Vidar sat at the head of the table this time.

Torvald's chair stood empty, and Torvald himself stood by the hearth with a coffee cup.

Ragna was curled in a leather chair near him with her phone.

I walked down the hall and dumped the veil out of the bag onto the middle of the table.

It landed across the butter dish.

"I locked my doors," I said. "Every one."

I dropped the card beside it.

Vidar picked it up.

He read it, and his face went perfectly still.

"Smell it," I said to the table. "You're wolves. Tell me who touched it."

The white-bearded man leaned over and breathed in.

Then the woman with the gray braid.

Then Vidar, holding the lace to his face, his eyes going gold.

He lowered it slowly.

"Nobody," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It's been washed." His voice was very quiet. "Wolfsbane soap. Nothing on it but you and cedar."

"Cedar," Torvald said thoughtfully from the hearth. "Half the closets in Gull Harbor are cedar."

Ragna didn't look up from her phone.

But she was smiling.

I looked at her for a long moment.

Then I looked at the table.

"Here's what's going to happen," I said. "I'm moving in."

Vidar's head came up.

"If someone wants me dead," I said, "they can come and try it in this house. In front of the King. Not in my mother's bedroom where nobody hears me scream."

A chair scraped at the far end of the hall.

Vidar's mother had come in through a side door.

She was in a long gray cardigan with her silver-streaked hair down her back.

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