Pack Law Made Him My Brother, So I Made Him My Mate novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Long Table

My mother caught me at the kitchen door in the green dress and held me at arm's length.

"You look beautiful," she said. "You look tired."

"I walked a long way."

"I know, mija."

She said it gently and went back to her pot of red chile.

Out the window, the horno stood in the yard, a round adobe oven the color of the ground.

Smoke came off it in a thin line.

"I light it at five every morning," my mother said.

"Amador's mother kept the coals in that pot for fifty years. She gave them to me before she died."

"That's a lot of responsibility for a fire," I said.

"It's the first fire I ever had to light."

She wiped her hands on her apron.

"We lived in my sister's trailer after your father died, remember?" she said. "I never had a stove that was mine."

"I remember."

"I have a fire now," she said. "Cirila says it's the heart of the house, and I'm its keeper."

"Do you like it here?"

"If anything happened to this house," my mother said, "I wouldn't know where to go."

Her voice stayed light.

I kissed her cheek and carried the bread to the long table.

The Westbrooks arrived at two.

The father was a big man in a gray hat who shook every hand once and held none of them.

His daughter stopped in the doorway and took in the room.

She was tall and red-blond, with a thick braid over one shoulder and a pale, composed face.

Her eyes went to Cruz first.

They went to me second, and they stayed.

"Charlotte," Amador said. "Sit by my son."

She sat at Cruz's left.

I sat at his right, next to my mother, with the tablecloth falling past my knees.

Cruz had not looked at me since he came in.

His jaw was tight.

Doña Cirila took her place at the foot of the table and laid her black cane across her lap.

The Westbrook father cut his meat and said, to nobody in particular, "I hear the new daughter is already part of the fire, Amador."

"She is," Amador said.

"The old rule is strict, I recall."

Doña Cirila lifted her good eye.

"It is strict," she said. "Let me tell the girl, so she knows what she married into."

The table went quiet.

I put my left hand under the tablecloth, onto Cruz's thigh.

He stopped breathing.

"Sixty years ago," Cirila said, "my brother loved the girl his father married."

My hand moved up.

"The pack found out before their mother named them."

Under the cloth, my palm settled over the hard line of him through his good slacks, and I felt him jerk.

"They ran them to the county line in January," said Cirila. "The young wolves did it, with teeth out. Three miles in the snow."

Charlotte turned to Cruz.

"The sheep are in the high pasture already?" she asked politely.

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