Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Terms

Carys learns only the Moon Court can strip Gregor's claim, talks her way onto Patsy's kitchen, and hears that the evidence that exiled Fraser burns in ten days.

The crew went quiet behind me.

Twenty wolves, and not one of them knew.

Fraser turned his head and looked at me.

I couldn't read anything in his face.

I could read his scent, though. Smoke and iron and something sharp underneath.

"Come home, sweetheart," Gregor said through the bullhorn. "Nobody's angry. You're sick. You're pregnant. You're not thinking straight."

Charmaine waved the clinic paper like a flag.

"Five weeks, everyone! Isn't it wonderful?"

The enforcers behind them clapped.

I walked down to the edge of the water.

I didn't have a bullhorn. I didn't need one. The river was quiet at dawn.

"I'm not coming home."

"Then stay over there," Gregor said pleasantly. "Have your little vacation with the trash. In December I'll send someone for my pup."

He handed the bullhorn to an enforcer and walked back up the bank.

Charmaine lingered one second longer.

She smiled at me across the water and put her hand on her own flat stomach.

Then she followed him.

I stood there until I couldn't feel my feet.

When I turned around, the crew had split around me.

Only Patsy and Fraser were left on the bank.

"Kitchen," Patsy said. "Both of you."

She put eggs in front of me that I couldn't eat.

Then she sat down across the table with her reading glasses on their beaded chain and folded her hands.

"You want the law or the comfort first?"

"The law."

"Good girl. A pup of a marked Luna belongs to her Alpha's house. Doesn't matter where it's born. Doesn't matter if she runs to Canada."

"I'm going to sever the mark."

"Sever it tomorrow. It won't matter. The pup was made while you wore it."

"So what does?"

"One thing. The Moon Court. Three Alphas of the valley, the Hunter's Moon in October. If they strip him, his claim goes with his seat. If they don't, that pup goes to him the day it's born."

"And me?"

Patsy took her glasses off.

"You get to visit. If he's in a good mood."

I put my hands over my stomach without meaning to.

Fraser was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed.

"Nobody's ever stripped an Alpha at the Moon Court," he said.

"Somebody's going to be first."

"With what?"

I didn't have an answer.

Patsy got up and started banging pans so we could pretend she wasn't listening.

I made myself look at Fraser.

"Tell me about the jacket."

His jaw moved.

"You read it. You know more about my jacket than I do."

"I know whose scent was loudest. Tell me where you were."

He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn't.

"Lookout tower on Saddle Peak. I was on fire watch that week. Alone. Nobody to swear I was up there all night."

"And the jacket?"

"I left it at a job that afternoon."

"What job?"

"Doesn't matter now."

"It mattered to the pack."

"The pack had you." He pushed off the counter. "Nineteen and scared to death, with your hands shaking on that table. You read what was loudest. I don't blame you for that."

"You should."

"I know." He almost smiled again. "I'm working on it."

I stood up.

"I want to stay."

"Crew rule is one night."

"Then change the rule. You're the boss."

"The crew hates you."

"I've been hated by better people. Charmaine does it in cashmere."

Patsy snorted into the dish water.

"What would you even do here?" Fraser said. "This is a fire crew. You can't swing a pulaski. You're pregnant."

"I can cook."

"Patsy cooks."

"Patsy is sixty-one and feeds twenty men three times a day," Patsy said without turning around. "Patsy would like a hand."

Fraser looked at her back.

"You hate help."

"I hate bad help. She was the only girl in the pack who ever scrubbed out the Keeping sinks without being told."

I'd forgotten that.

I'd been fourteen, and she'd let me sit in the vault and smell the old evidence bags for practice.

Fraser rubbed the burn scar on the back of his right hand.

"Fine. Kitchen. You stay out of the barn, out of the trucks and out of my way."

"Out of your way how? It's a small camp."

"Figure it out."

"Do you want me to wear a bell?"

"Would you?"

"No."

"Then don't offer."

He went out.

Patsy handed me an apron and a knife and pointed at a fifty-pound sack of potatoes.

"Peel."

By noon I had blisters, and I'd found out the crew's names for me.

The Nose. The Luna. Gregor's Wife.

The kid on the porch called me Oathbreaker under his breath when I brought out the coffee.

At lunch nobody sat at my end of the table.

I didn't care.

I was wearing wool socks, and nobody in this camp had ever called me barren.

Fraser was the last one in.

He sat down at my end of the table without a word.

Twenty heads turned.

He reached for the salt, and I passed it before he asked.

His fingers stopped one inch from mine.

Neither of us moved.

The bond hummed down my arm.

He took the salt by the very top of the shaker and ate his potatoes like nothing had happened.

His ears had gone red.

On the shelf above the stove, Patsy's old scanner crackled.

She kept it tuned to the pack channel, the one the elders used for notices.

A man's voice came on, dry and official.

"Notice from the Keeping. Eight years having passed since the verdict in the death of Angus Kinnaird, the evidence will be burned and the matter closed forever. The burning takes place July third, at the July supper."

Fraser put his fork down.

Patsy turned off the water.

I tracked the dates under the table.

Nine days.

After that the jacket would be ash, and my oath would be the only truth the pack had left.

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