Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Seven Nights

In Dorran's rooms they set terms, and the mark on her shoulder turns silver.

The hall was still roaring when Dorran put his coat around my shoulders and walked me out of it.

He didn't touch me beyond that.

His hand stayed at the small of my back, an inch off, the whole way through the crowd.

My shoulder throbbed with every step, and the warmth in my chest kept rolling, slow and heavy.

High Ridge lodge sat on the hill above the Moot Hall, three floors of dark logs and lit windows.

He took me up to the top floor and opened a door at the end of the hall.

"These are mine," he said. "The Seven Nights custom says a claimed bride sleeps here for a week."

"Where do you sleep?"

"Here."

I looked at the bed. It was the largest bed I had ever seen.

"There's a couch," he said. "You'll have the bed."

He shut the door behind us and finally looked at me properly, with the lamplight on his face.

"Show me the message."

I held out Rosalie's phone.

He read her text standing, and I watched his jaw tighten at every line.

When he got to Love you love you love you, he handed the phone back without a word.

"She's coming back by midnight," he said.

"That's what she wrote."

"It's ten past eleven."

"Then she has fifty minutes."

He said nothing to that, which was an answer.

A knock came at the door, and a red-haired man leaned in with a tray in both hands.

"Soup," Keegan said. "Bread, cheese, the good pickles, and a thing Hester called a poultice that I'm not touching. Evening, Miss Marrow. I'm the one who didn't laugh."

"I noticed," I said. "Thank you."

"He's not as bad as he looks."

"Keegan," Dorran said.

"He's worse, actually, but he feeds people." Keegan set the tray on the table and backed out grinning.

I hadn't eaten since the toast at breakfast. I ate all of it, standing up, while Dorran watched from across the room with his arms crossed.

"Terms," he said, when the bowl was empty.

"Yours or mine?"

"Start with mine." He didn't move from the wall. "A year and a day. I won't send you home, because that would void the treaty and I don't break treaties for pride. In front of both packs you are my claimed bride, and you'll be treated as one."

"And in private?"

"In private you are a guest. You have the bed and the lock. Nobody touches you here, myself included."

My face went hot.

"I wasn't asking you to."

"I know. I'm telling you what you don't have to worry about."

"I'm not worried," I said, and I was surprised to find it true.

He took a moment with that.

"Your terms."

"You search for Rosalie, and you don't punish Cold Creek when she's found. She made this mess. My pack didn't."

"Your pack sent a stand-in to a Claiming."

"My father did. That's one man."

A muscle moved in his cheek.

"And the river land stays with Marrow," I said. "Whatever she does."

"The river land stays with Marrow as long as you stand," Dorran said. "That is what the treaty says, and it's all I'm bound to."

"Then I stand."

"Agreed." He looked at my face a little longer than he needed to. "You said the vow yourself. Nobody told you to."

"Nobody did."

"Why?"

I was tired enough that I told him the true thing.

"Because I've been the spare my whole life. I thought for once the spare could be useful."

He didn't say anything.

It was the first time I'd seen his face change, and then it was gone.

At midnight neither of us pretended not to watch the phone.

At half past, it was still silent.

At one, I put it face down on the nightstand.

A second knock came, soft this time, and the old woman with the white braid came in without waiting.

She leaned on a cane and looked at me with sharp blue eyes.

"Hester," Dorran said. "It's late."

"Your bride's shoulder is bleeding through your coat, and you didn't think to ask a healer." She pointed her cane at a chair. "Sit, girl."

I sat. Dorran stayed where he was.

Hester peeled the coat down off my left shoulder and the collar of my dress after it, and she went very quiet.

"What?" Dorran said.

She didn't answer him.

She wiped the bite clean with a warm cloth, slowly, and tilted the lamp toward it.

A claiming mark is meant to scar dark red, the color of the bite, and every Ironwood bride before me had worn one.

Mine had already closed.

It was a pale silver crescent, and it shone in the lamplight.

"Dorran," Hester said, very carefully. "Come and look at this."

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