A Hatred Most Pure novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Latch
On harvest night in a packed inn, Cora finds the back door bolted by her friend, walks out to face the Urekai Alpha she wronged as a girl, and hears he will not kill her but keep her.
A dozen riders in black coats walked into the inn on harvest night, and every voice in the room stopped.
I was carrying four plates of lamb to the long table.
The room had been loud with singing, and now nobody made a sound.
The first rider had to duck under the door beam.
He wore a black glove on his left hand, and the fingers inside it stayed curled while the rest of him moved.
My own left hand had gone numb at dusk, the way it did every first frost, and I had been flexing it under the bar all evening.
He looked over the room once and stopped on me.
His eyes were gray, so pale they were almost silver.
I had last seen those eyes in a ten-year-old's face.
I was the girl who had made that boy cry every day for three years.
He was Ansel Rooke now, Alpha of the Urekai, and I had been running from him since I was fifteen.
I set the lamb down in front of a farmer who didn't touch it.
Then I walked into the kitchen, saying I needed more bread, and went straight to the back door.
That morning Hester had fixed the latch.
"It won't stick on you anymore, Nell," she'd said, patting my arm. "I did it right this time. You can walk out of here any hour you like."
I pulled the iron handle.
It didn't move.
A new bolt had been driven in from the outside, and I could hear the pin hold when I pushed.
"Don't," Hester said behind me.
She was standing by the stove with her apron wrung into a rope.
Her face was wet already.
"His man came Tuesday," she said. "He paid my boy's healer through the winter. The whole winter, Nell. The cough was getting worse and I couldn't."
"Did he say what he wants with me?"
"He swore it was only to talk."
I looked at her for a while.
I had eaten at her table for two years. I had held her son's head over a basin all one night in March.
"I'd have run a lot sooner if you'd asked me for the money instead," I said.
She put her hand over her mouth.
I let go of the handle.
My left hand tingled, coming back to life, and I thought: eleven towns, nine names, and I am so tired.
I could have hidden in the cellar.
I could have gone for the knife on the chopping block and made someone bleed.
Then the whole room would have been a fight, and every person out there had a family.
So I stopped running.
I walked back through the kitchen door and across the dining room.
I went between the tables, past the farmer and the carter and the two sisters who sold eggs.
The riders along the wall didn't move.
Ansel Rooke stood in the middle of the floor and watched me come.
He was bigger than I had let myself imagine, and he was only twenty-eight years old.
I stopped an arm's length away.
"Alpha Rooke," I said.
"Cora Tarrant."
His voice was low and calm.
He said my real name and my father's pack loud enough for every ear in the room.
"Saltmarsh," he said. "Eighteen years."
Someone at the far table pushed back a chair. Saltmarsh wolves were not loved in the north.
"Yes," I said.
"You don't ask me what I want?"
"I think I know." I kept my voice level. "Whatever it is, do it outside. These people never did anything to you."
The corner of his mouth moved.
It wasn't a smile.
He lifted his bare right hand and I saw the whole room watch it.
His bare palm closed along my jaw, hot, wide, heavy enough to hold my head still.
His thumb pressed under my cheekbone, right where I used to hit him.
I made myself stand there.
"You think I came to kill you," he said.
"Didn't you?"
"A knife is quick." His thumb moved once across my skin. "And you'd like that. A clean end, a little blood, and you are finished with it."
"Then what do you want?"
His gray eyes held mine.
"I'm not going to kill you, Cora," he said. "I'm going to keep you."
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