Fate Picked Me, the Alpha Passed, and I Felt Nothing novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Words Only

The keeper lived in a one-room cabin behind the old Grange hall.

She opened the door before I knocked.

She was a tiny woman in a grey shawl, with a face like a dried apple and eyes like wet black stones.

"Sit," she said.

I sat at her table, and she put a cup of pine-needle tea in front of me.

"They told you the refusal cuts both ends," she said. "It does not."

"I figured that out."

"It cuts the end of the one refused. The refuser keeps his. It has happened twice in my life."

"Why does nobody say so?"

"The first time, Garland Hume was in the room. He was seven years old. His mother was the one refused."

I set the cup down.

"He knows."

"He has always known. A pack that believes a refusal is clean never fears an Alpha's. And an Alpha with a live bond and no mate at his side can be called unfit." She tilted her head. "He has waited nine years for Dray to stumble."

My heart was pounding.

"Then I should tell them."

"You will, when it does the most good. Today they would say poor rejected girl, and you would say you are not, and they would not hear it."

"Why tell me now?"

"Because there is one more thing the Council has forgotten." She leaned forward. "A bond cut on one side can be made again by the one it was cut from. If she says the Naming words to him alone, with no moon and no pack, of her own will, it comes back on both ends. And she feels all of it."

The room was very quiet.

"I'm not going to say them," I said. "Not now."

"Not now is a good answer."

"I want to pick him with a clear head first. Then I'll decide about the rest."

The keeper smiled for the first time.

"Drink your tea, girl," she said.

An hour later I walked in the back door of Fournier's with my head spinning.

Odile was dragging a fifty-pound sack of flour across the floor, and Dray Wetherell had the other end.

He wore a flannel with the sleeves rolled up and flour on his forearms.

"He showed up at five a.m.," Odile said. "Rue, the storeroom needs inventory. You two go count the sugar. For about twenty minutes."

She winked so hard her whole face moved.

I took Dray by the wrist and walked him into the storeroom and shut the door.

It was narrow, with shelves of butter and sugar and a stack of flour sacks along the back wall.

"The keeper told me what it would take to mend this," I said. "It's mine to do, and nobody else's."

He went completely still.

"Rue."

"I'm not going to. I'm telling you so you don't have to guess."

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