Chapter 20: The Last Word

"You marry him," I repeated.

My voice came out thin, and my shoulder was bleeding through the rags.

Three hundred Blackwater wolves knelt in front of me, and behind them my whole pack stood watching to see what I would do.

Nobody had told me what Alphas do next.

Rhett limped across the bare stone to where I knelt and stopped in front of me.

He was bleeding from the shoulder, in a coat that wasn't his, with his hair stuck to his forehead.

Then he went down on both knees.

Cedar Ridge made a sound behind him.

Their Alpha was kneeling on the floor of a rival hall in front of both packs.

"Jessa," he said.

"Get up."

"No."

"Rhett."

"I owe a sentence to three hundred people who watched me fail to finish it."

His voice carried to the doors.

"I'm going to say all of it this time. Then you can tell me to get up."

I didn't answer.

He lifted his head.

"I am Rhett Stallard, Alpha of Cedar Ridge," he said. "I name the claim of fate between myself and Jessa Rawson."

"I do not refuse it."

"I hold it. I will not sever it for a treaty, or a pack, or my own life."

"I am hers, and I have been hers since a creek in June, and every wolf in me knows it."

"If she'll have me, I would be proud to be called hers in front of anyone."

The silence stretched.

I realized my own hands were shaking.

Somewhere behind me, Lorna sniffed loudly.

"That's the sentence," Rhett said. "The treaty didn't write that one."

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