Fate Picked Me, the Alpha Passed, and I Felt Nothing novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Naming
The moon names Rue the Alpha's fated mate, the bond lights her palm, and Dray refuses her before the whole pack and drops to his knees while she feels nothing at all.
The moon came up over Round Lake, and the keeper said my name.
"Rue Tolland."
I was standing on the Stone Landing, and I knew every board of it.
I had rebuilt that landing myself two summers ago, with cedar from the Hartley mill and a rented auger.
Seventy-four wolves stood around me in the cold with their breath showing.
Most of them had come to watch someone else get named.
The keeper was a small old woman in a grey shawl, and she held the silver bowl up to the moon.
"The moon names a mate for Rue Tolland," she said.
My stomach dropped.
Nobody had been named at the October Naming in three years.
I had stopped hoping to be, and I had stopped hoping not to be.
"The moon names Dray Wetherell."
The whole pack went still, because Dray Wetherell was our Alpha.
I looked across the landing and found him at the edge of the boards.
He was standing very straight, with his navy coat open and his sleeves pushed up.
His sandy hair was blowing across his forehead.
The burn scar on the side of his neck looked white in the moonlight.
He was looking straight at me, and his face had no colour in it.
I had hung every door in his house.
I had known him my whole life, and I had never once seen him look afraid.
"Come to the center," the keeper said. "Clasp wrists."
My legs moved before I told them to.
Dray walked out to meet me, and the boards creaked under both of us.
We stopped a foot apart.
He held out his right arm, and I took it by the wrist.
His hand closed around mine.
The heat hit my palm.
It ran up my arm and into my chest, and it settled low in my belly with a hum I could feel in my teeth.
A silver crescent lit up in the middle of my palm.
His lit up too, and the pack saw it.
Somebody gasped.
I had never wanted anything the way I wanted to step into him right then.
My whole body leaned.
His thumb pressed hard against the inside of my wrist, and I heard him breathe in.
For one second he looked at me.
Then his face shut.
"I refuse it," Dray said.
His voice carried across the whole landing.
The pack made a sound, a low shock of seventy-four people.
I didn't pull my hand away.
I think I believed I had misheard.
"Say it again," the keeper said quietly. "Once more, and it is done."
"I refuse it."
He let go of my wrist.
The silver in my palm went out.
It didn't fade slowly; it went out.
The heat drained out of my arm, my chest and my belly, one after another, down to my feet.
I waited for the hurt to come in behind it.
It didn't.
There was no hole, no grief and no ache.
There was a quiet I hadn't known I'd been missing, like a machine shutting off in a workshop.
I stood on the cold boards and felt completely like myself.
Dray had dropped to one knee.
He had one hand flat on the boards and the other fisted against his ribs.
His whole body was shaking.
He made a sound I had only heard from animals, low and torn, and he didn't look up.
Joss Brannigan, his Beta, took a step toward him and stopped.
"Well," said Garland Hume, from the council row.
The council chair smoothed his silver hair back and spoke in a pleasant voice.
"That's that, then. The bond is cut. Nobody blames the Alpha for making his choice."
"Nobody asked me," I said.
Heads turned.
I was a carpenter with sawdust on my sleeves, and I had just said it out loud to seventy-four people.
I looked at Dray, still kneeling, still not looking at me.
"You could have said no in private," I said.
He lifted his head.
His eyes were wet, and the pale blue of them looked almost white.
"Rue," he said, and his voice cracked in half.
"No," I said. "You had your turn."
I turned around and walked off the landing.
Nobody stopped me.
I crossed the gravel to my truck, and I got in, and I sat with both hands on the wheel.
I waited to fall apart.
My heart was beating normally.
My hands were steady.
Someone rapped on my window, and I jumped.
It was Odile Fournier, flour still on her forearms from the bakery, her short blond hair standing up in the wind.
I rolled the window down.
"Rue." Her green eyes went over my face. "Honey. Why aren't you crying?"
"I keep checking," I said. "There's nothing there."
Behind her, down on the landing, the Alpha of the Notch pack was still on his knees on the boards.
And I felt nothing about it at all.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend