Accidentally Fell for My Ex's Uncle: Dark Alpha novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Hour
Two hundred wolves bet on the minute Poppy dies while Lucan holds her hand under the table. HOOK: at fifty-nine minutes a silver crescent rises on her wrist.
The hour started with a seating chart.
Lucan sat me at the head table, in the chair beside his, and every wolf on the lawn turned their chair to face us.
Nobody ate.
Waiters came around with trays, and nobody touched a single canapé.
"They're waiting for me to drop," I whispered.
"They are," Lucan said.
"That's rude."
"It is tradition."
An old man two tables over took out a notebook and wrote something down.
"Is he taking bets?" I asked.
"Yes."
"On what?"
"The minute."
A teenager ran past with a cash box, and a woman in a green hat held up three fingers.
"Fifty-one," she called. "I like fifty-one."
I looked at Lucan.
"You're letting them bet on my death at your own wedding."
"They bet at the last six."
"That doesn't make it better."
"No," he said. "It makes it ours."
His voice was so dry that I laughed, and he looked at me, surprised.
Behind us, the string quartet started its second song.
The old woman stood at the end of the table with her watch held up in front of her face.
"Nine minutes," she said, to nobody and everybody.
The silver-haired woman in pearls came up behind my chair and set a cushion on it.
"For your back, dear," she said. "These chairs are dreadful. I'm Odette, Brent's mother. I'm so sorry about my son. He has never once been on time to an apology."
She smiled, and she squeezed my shoulder, and she walked off with her tea.
"She's nice," I said.
"She is," Lucan said. He watched her go, and for a second his jaw did something small.
"Twenty minutes," the old woman said.
Frankie and Dottie had been seated at a table near the back, between a pack elder and a potted fern.
Frankie stood up.
"Under section nine of the Moonstone code," he said, loudly, "no bride may be compelled to die within the hour!"
"Sit down," said Dottie.
"I'm just saying it's in the code!"
"There's nothing in the code about that."
"There's nothing in the code against it!"
A guard escorted him back to his chair, and Frankie kept reading to the fern.
Lucan turned his head toward me.
"What is your wolf called?" he said.
"What?"
"The hour is long. I would like to know the thing in you that wagged at me."
My face went hot. "She doesn't have a name."
"She wagged."
"She's a dog person," I said. "She wags at everyone."
"Then she is easily bought."
"She's a rec-center wolf," I said. "I teach swim lessons to six-year-olds. She will wag at anything that doesn't bite."
"Can you swim six miles?"
"Why would I need to swim six miles?"
"I do not know," he said. "I have never asked a bride what she could do."
I stopped smiling.
"Thirty minutes," the old woman said.
Under the table, my knee was bouncing so hard that the cloth shook. I pressed my hand on it.
Lucan put his hand over mine.
It was large and warm, and it covered both my hand and my knee.
He did not say anything about it, and neither did I.
"I'm sorry about her," I said. I kept my eyes on the tablecloth. "I know I keep saying that. I didn't even learn her name."
His hand did not move.
"I met her twice," he said. "She was kind to a waiter. I thought that would be enough."
"Enough for what?"
"To live."
I turned my hand over under his and held on.
"Forty-five minutes," the old woman said, and her voice was not as cheerful now.
The woman in the green hat had stopped taking bets.
Nobody was talking anymore, even the old man with the notebook. A breeze came in off the river and moved the string lights.
At fifty-two minutes my wrist began to itch.
At fifty-five the itch turned cold and sharp.
"Lucan," I said.
"I know."
"Is that supposed to happen?"
"I do not know," he said. "It has never happened."
At fifty-nine minutes a thin silver crescent rose on the inside of my wrist and began to glow.
The old woman dropped her watch.
Two hundred wolves went completely silent.
Lucan stood up so fast that his chair fell over.
His eyes were blazing, and he held my wrist up in front of the whole lawn.
"Nobody leaves," he said.
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