Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veil
Tilda walks to the alpha in her runaway sister's veil before two packs, says the vow herself, and the wolf she never had opens its eyes.
Four hundred wolves watched me walk across the hall in my sister's bridal veil.
Not one of them knew it was me.
The lace came down to my chin, and through it the hall was a blur of firelight and shoulders.
His pack stood on the left side of the aisle and mine on the right.
My pack was smaller, thinner and dressed in its one good set of clothes.
At the far end stood the alpha, Dorran, with his hands clasped behind him.
He was the biggest man in the room, and he did not look at the bride until she was ten steps away.
That morning I had still thought I was only the sister who carried the flowers.
My father had poured my tea at six, as he did every morning.
It was the bitter brown kind he said was good for my lungs, and my twin always carried the cup up to my room herself.
"Drink it down, Til," Rosalie had said, sitting on the end of my bed in her robe. "Daddy's watching."
I drank it down. She stole a corner of my toast.
At noon she was gone.
Her wedding dress hung on the closet door, and her phone sat on the pillow with one text open on it, already sent to me.
It said: Stall him until midnight. The vow can't be said before the third bell. I'll be back before then, I swear on Mom.
Under that: He won't even look at you. He'll never know. Worst case he sends you home. Love you love you love you.
I ran downstairs with the phone in my fist.
My father stood in the kitchen with both hands flat on the table and his head down.
"Dad, she's left. She's run off with that boy from the feed store, she's gone."
"I know," he said.
He didn't ask where. He didn't ask why.
"If the bride doesn't stand at the Claiming, we forfeit the river land," he said. "Ironwood takes it by force, Tilda. Three hundred wolves. Eighty of them children."
"Then we tell Dorran the truth."
"He'll call it an insult, and he'll be right." My father finally lifted his face, and he looked ten years older than he had at breakfast. "One night. You walk, you stand, and you say nothing. Rosalie gets back, and we fix it."
I thought about the eighty children.
I thought about Rosalie, who had never once left me alone in a room of strangers.
So I put on the veil.
Now I stood ten steps from the alpha, and my knees were not shaking, which surprised me.
Dorran looked at last.
He had grey eyes and a hard, closed face, and a scar ran from his jaw down into his collar.
He took one breath through his nose, his expression locking dead still.
The elder at his shoulder, a woman with a white braid, leaned in and said something I couldn't hear.
Dorran didn't answer her.
He reached out and lifted the front of my veil with two fingers.
The hall made a sound I had never heard four hundred people make.
It was a long, low "oh."
"That is not Rosalie Marrow," Dorran said.
His voice carried to every wall.
My father stepped out of the Marrow line with his hands open.
"She is my daughter, Alpha. The treaty says a daughter of the Marrow line."
"Osmund Marrow," Dorran said. "Which daughter?"
"The other one."
Someone on the Ironwood side laughed.
"The spare," a man said, not quietly. "They sent the spare."
The red-haired man at Dorran's shoulder, Keegan, did not laugh, and he elbowed the one who had.
My face burned, and I kept it exactly where it was.
I had been the spare for twenty-three years. I knew how to stand still while it was said.
Dorran had not looked away from me.
"Do you know what you are standing in front of?" he asked.
"A claiming," I said. "Yours, if you take it."
"And if I don't, your pack loses the river."
"Yes."
"Did you know your sister had gone?"
"Since noon."
"And you came anyway."
"There are eighty children on that land," I said. "I came anyway."
The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the fire.
His grandmother Hester, the old woman with the braid, said very softly, "Dorran."
He ignored her. His eyes stayed on mine, and I did not look down.
I could have bowed my head and let him send me home, and Cold Creek would have burned for it.
So I said the vow myself.
"I am Tilda Marrow, of the Marrow line. I stand here unclaimed, and I ask the alpha of High Ridge to take me."
My voice cracked on the last word.
Dorran said nothing for a long moment.
Then he took my chin in one big hand and tilted my head to the left, away from my shoulder.
"Tilda Marrow," he said. "I claim you for a year and a day."
His teeth went into my shoulder.
It hurt more than anything I had ever felt.
Then the pain flipped over into something else, a deep, rolling warmth that ran down my spine and through my ribs.
In my whole life I had never had a wolf. Every other child in Cold Creek had shifted by sixteen, and I never had.
Something inside my chest opened its eyes.
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