Don't Disturb Stella and Her Mates novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Offer in the Dessert Shop
Stella offers Thora the show and the mates in front of three phones, and Thora signs on her own terms. Her mother has already signed her entry.
Stella Ostrow slid a contract across the dessert shop table and smiled at the phone aimed at her from the next booth.
"Thora, I know you think I took your mother and your fiancés."
Her voice was soft and carried to every table.
"I never wanted it to be like this."
Thora Ostrow kept her spoon in the cream and said nothing.
"I love Mother, and she loves me. I can only share her with you."
Stella tapped the page.
"But I don't need the mates. I'll give them back."
She leaned in, eyes wet and kind.
"They just have some wrong ideas about you. So come on Primal Hearts with me, the survival dating show."
"If you do well on the live feed, they'll fall for you."
Three phones were up now.
Thora had counted them when Stella sat down.
She looked at the plate Stella had ordered for her, the pear tart that cost nine hundred credits.
"I know the cheap ones upset your stomach," Stella had said, and paid before Thora could reach for her card.
It was a kind thing to do.
It was also exactly how it went in the book.
Thora had been a survivor in a dead world, and she starved to death in a cellar with three tins of beans and no way to open them.
Then she woke up in this body, in this dessert shop, as the Ostrow family's real daughter.
The real daughter was jealous and clingy and hated.
The real daughter lost every fight with Stella, because Stella had been raised in a mansion and Thora had been raised in the slum ring of Kessel Station.
The real daughter went on Primal Hearts to win back five men.
She chased them across the forests of Karst on a live feed until they despised her.
Then she walked into the trees alone and never walked out.
Stella had taken everything that was hers except her blood.
After Karst, the blood would not matter.
Thora set the spoon down.
"No," she said. "I won't go on your show, and I won't take those fiancés either."
Stella did not stop smiling.
She did not even blink.
"That's a shame," she said. "Because I already signed contracts with all five men."
She turned the paper so Thora could read it.
"You're the only name left. See you on the show."
Stella stood and gathered her bag.
On her way past the counter, she picked up a small white paper bag the clerk held out.
"The boys' morning tonics," she told the clerk, loud enough for the booth with the phones. "I fetch them myself every week. They won't take them from anyone else."
She turned back to Thora.
"Eat the tart. You've lost weight since you came home."
She meant it kindly.
Everyone in the shop could see that.
The door chimed.
Joren Vask came in, tall in his Fleet coat, and did not look at Thora at all.
He looked at Stella's wet eyes and went stiff.
"Did she make you cry again?"
"Joren, no," Stella said. "We were just talking."
Joren took the white bag out of her hand and held the door open for her.
Then, only then, he glanced at Thora.
"Stay away from her table," he said. "Next time I'll stop being polite."
Every phone in the shop followed him out.
Thora sat alone with her pear tart.
Her hands were not shaking.
She had watched people turn on each other over one jar of water, and she knew how a pack decided who to feed to the dark.
This was the same thing with better coats.
She pulled the contract toward her and read it, every clause.
It was a standard entry form for Primal Hearts.
Ten weeks on Karst, contestants dropped by pod, no supplies but a kit allowance.
Beneath it was a pairing clause that bound every entrant to "pursue a bond in good faith with all five Ostrow-registered mates."
If she refused, Stella would not argue.
Stella would just send the contract to the Marshal.
The Marshal would sign it for her, and Thora would be dropped on Karst in a gown, the way the book said.
In the book she lost because she walked in blind and begging.
She did not have to walk in blind.
She picked up the pen.
Under the pairing clause she wrote, in capital letters: ENTRY AS SURVIVOR ONLY. NO PAIRING. NO PURSUIT.
Then she signed her name.
So Thora went to the show.
She would not go for the men, or for Stella, or for the feed.
She would go because the forest was the only place in the story where she knew what to do.
She turned the page over to check for anything else Stella might have slipped in.
The back was blank except for one stamp, pressed in deep red wax in the lower corner.
It was the Ostrow family seal, and next to it, in a hand Thora had seen on every one of her own school reports, was a signature.
The Marshal had already signed her entry form.
Her mother had known about the show before Thora ever sat down.
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