Seven Rejections Later My Second Chance Mate Is an Alpha King novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Alpha King at Muster

Duncan Strathclyde shifts back in front of the whole pack, names Morven, and tells Dane he has been counting; then he turns to Hester and says she has been counting too.

By sunrise the black wolf had stood up, walked to the pack gate and sat down in the middle of the road.

Nobody told it to leave.

Black Pine's border scouts muster at that gate every morning at six, and I am a border scout.

I was also supposed to be dying.

I put on my boots, because I am stubborn, and walked down with Tobin to stand in my usual place in line.

The muster ground went quiet when I came into it.

Forty wolves turned their heads, and I watched them do the sum.

Cut at the Stone last night.

Fever by midnight.

Alive at six.

An elder crossed herself with two fingers, which she had not done at any of my other cuts.

Dane was already there, standing by the gate post with his arms crossed and his jaw set.

Valerie stood a little behind him, in his coat.

He saw me and his face did four things at once, and none of them was sorry.

"Morven," he said. "Good. Walk over here."

"No."

"I'm not going to say it twice."

"Good," I said. "Don't."

Then the wolf in the road got up.

It shook its coat once, and shimmered, and was a man.

He was big, as big as the wolf, six and a half feet of him with black hair cut close and a scar through his left eyebrow.

Someone behind him, one of three men in dark coats I hadn't noticed standing at the fence, threw him a long coat, and he put it on and left it open.

He had gray eyes.

He looked straight at me across forty yards of frozen ground, and my chest turned warm from end to end.

It was the same warmth as last night.

It was him.

"Morven MacLellan," said the man.

It was the voice from the road, low and level, and nothing like Dane's.

Dane came off the gate post.

"You've crossed into my land without a word to me," he said. "Who are you?"

"Duncan Strathclyde."

A murmur went through the pack, and a few of them stepped back.

I had known the name my whole life.

Everyone has.

The Alpha King of the Crown holds every pack in the mountains, and every Alpha answers to him at the Winter Gathering.

I had never seen him.

Black Pine had never once seen him inside its fence.

"Your Majesty," Dane said, and his voice cracked a little. "You're early. The Gathering isn't until the Winter Moon."

"I'm not here for the Gathering."

"Then whatever you want, you'll have it, but I'd ask you to step back from my mate."

Duncan Strathclyde didn't step back, and he wasn't close.

"She isn't your mate this morning," he said.

"She's my mate. We're bonded. I've sworn it seven times."

"You've cut it seven times."

The muster ground did not make a sound.

Dane's mouth went tight.

"That's between her and me."

"It was between you and her six times," Duncan said. "The seventh was at the Stone, in front of two hundred wolves and the moon. I wasn't there. I felt it anyway."

I opened my mouth.

I did not know what I was going to say.

Duncan turned his head toward me, and the gray eyes went gentler, and he didn't come one step closer.

"I'm sorry I spoke inside you without asking," he said. "You were falling. I had four hundred miles to cover and no other way to reach you."

"You're the voice," I said.

"Yes."

"I'm not sick anymore."

"No. You're not."

"Is that you?"

"Yes," he said. "And I'll stop, at once, if you tell me to."

I didn't tell him to.

I stood there with my hands shaking and my heartbeat steady for the first time in a week.

Dane noticed that, and his face turned dark red.

"You don't get to have her," he said. "I gave her my name seven times. She's mine to cut and mine to take back, and the pack knows it."

"Your pack," said Duncan, "knows how many times you've cut her, Alpha MacCarthy."

"Everyone counts."

"I counted," said Duncan. "I counted every one."

Then he turned his back on Dane, which in that pack was an insult worse than a blow, and looked across the muster ground to the edge of the crowd.

Hester MacCarthy stood there in her gray cardigan with her hand in its pocket.

She had come to see me, I thought.

She had come to make sure I was alive.

"Hester," Duncan said, without raising his voice. "You counted too."

Her face went white all at once.

Her hand tightened on the pocket until I could see the shape of the little notebook through the wool.

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