My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: The Teller in the Kitchen
I learned about the Naming over a bowl of beans, in a kitchen full of women who did not speak to me.
The tall housekeeper told me, because I asked her flat out and she did not lie.
"When a Luna has her first child," she said, ladling, "it's Named at the fire before the next Reckoning."
"I'm not a Luna," I said.
"No."
"I'm not having a child."
"No," the housekeeper agreed. "That's why I'm telling you."
She set the bowl in front of me.
"The Teller stands at the fire and speaks the deeds of all four grandparents, aloud, for the pack to hear," she said. "What the child's blood has earned, and what it owes."
I looked at the bowl.
"That's what the old woman wants to see my face for," I said.
"It is the custom."
"Nobody's naming anything."
"Then nobody will ask," she said, and left me with the beans.
That was Friday, the third of October.
It was a bright cold day, with the apple pickers out in the orchard and the cider mill roaring behind the house.
I had been under Ned McCracken's roof six days.
I had gone to my route on Wednesday and Thursday in the Honda.
A boy from the pack sat in the passenger seat, because Ned would not have me drive alone.
I had said yes to that.
It was not one of my terms, and I could not find the argument.
I had sat with a woman dying of emphysema and a retired miner whose daughters would not come.
In both rooms I had thought of nothing but a man's hands.
I did not know what we were.
We had not spoken about it.
On Thursday morning we had met in the hall and both stopped.
We had stood a foot apart looking at the floorboards until the housekeeper coughed from the kitchen door.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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