The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: The Blood Moon

"Now," I said back.

Behind us the pack had gone dead quiet.

They didn't know what was coming next.

Neither did I, exactly, and I didn't care.

"Arne," I said, without turning around.

He was already coming.

He came across the trampled grass of the circle in his old ambulance jacket, with his bent glasses crooked on his nose.

Nobody stopped him.

He looked at my bleeding arm and my swollen fingers and my mother's ruined dress, and his mustache shook.

"Lord, kid," he said. "Look at you."

"You said you'd walk me."

"It's twelve feet."

"Then walk me twelve feet."

He held out his arm.

I took it.

He walked me to the foot of the old gray Stone, slow.

Tove ran in behind us with a roll of gauze from somebody's car and wrapped my arm while we walked.

Vidar's mother was there at the Stone already.

She was crying without making any sound.

Arne stopped in front of Vidar.

He looked up at the King of the Northshore, barefoot in borrowed jeans, with the moon going red behind his head.

"She's the best thing this town has," Arne said. "You know that."

"I know that."

"Good." He put my hand in Vidar's. "Don't hold back."

He stepped away.

There was no priest.

There didn't need to be.

"I'm not going anywhere," Vidar said, loud enough for the rise to hear. "Not at moonset. Not ever."

"Everything I am is yours, and I'm keeping none of it back."

My throat closed up.

I made it open.

"I chose you," I said. "On my own feet, with my eyes open. I'll keep choosing you."

"That's the only vow I know how to make."

He opened my right hand.

My left was too swollen, and he didn't even look at it.

He slid his mother's ring onto my right ring finger in front of two hundred wolves and eleven Alphas.

It fit.

"The Queen," the Duluth Alpha said from the rise, and somebody on the pack's side said it after her, and then all of them did.

It went around the point under the red moon like a wave coming in.

Vidar picked me up.

He carried me out of the circle and up the cliff path through the birches, and nobody followed us.

His room was cold.

He set me down, crossed to the wall of windows, and threw every one of them open to the night.

The moon was hanging over the lake, round and dark red, and the light it threw into the room was red too.

It fell across the bed.

It fell across him, standing in front of me with his chest bare.

The gray had already crept back past his wrists.

I could see it climbing.

"Let me see your arm," he said.

"No."

"Linnea."

"You can see my arm in the morning," I said, and I reached behind me for the last buttons of my mother's dress.

I unbuttoned my mother's dress and let it fall.

The cold air came through the open windows and found every inch of me.

I stood there in nothing but the gauze on my arm and his ring on my hand.

Vidar looked at me like the moon had started beating in my chest.

His eyes were already gold at the edges.

I reached out and put my hand flat on his bare stomach.

He was burning hot under my palm.

"Come here," I said.

He came.

I pulled his mouth down to mine and kissed him with everything I'd been holding back since the first night I saw him on that floor.

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