Half Were Mine novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Days
Bronwyn calls her brother to help her move out, Rhett freezes her out again and she stops apologizing; on his desk she finds a courting announcement with another woman's name.
I called my brother Cormac from the bathroom floor, and my voice broke on the first word.
"I need a truck and two strong backs. I'm moving out. Three days from now."
He didn't answer right away.
Then he whooped so loud I held the phone away from my ear.
"You're leaving Rhett? You're really leaving that enforcer?"
I heard something slam on his end, probably the desk in his patrol office.
"Thank the Moon. Our Alpha is going to lose his mind when I tell him."
I didn't understand why my brother thought the Alpha needed to hear about my love life.
My face was already wet, and I was too tired to ask.
"I need one more favor," I said. "I want to start seeing someone. Someone decent. You know every wolf in this pack. Keep your ears open."
Cormac laughed, and it was a happy, wicked sound.
"Decent? Bronwyn, I've had the right wolf picked out for years. He's been waiting on you for ages."
"What?"
"Nothing. When are you free? I'll set it up."
He hung up before I could push.
I sat there with the phone in my hand and looked at the photo on the shelf above the sink.
Me and Rhett Sawyer at last year's bonfire, cropped so tight you couldn't tell two people were standing there.
Four years, and nobody in Cedarfall Pack knew.
I wiped my face and texted Cormac: Three days.
Then I stood up and went to the living room, because the front door had opened.
Rhett came in from his shift with a grocery bag on his arm and hung his jacket on the hook.
He had bought the dark roast I liked. He always remembered the small things.
The couch faces the door, and I had been crying on it for hours.
I knew exactly how I looked.
He didn't look at me.
He walked straight past and into the bedroom, and the door closed.
I knew what came next, because I had lived it for four years.
The silence started first. He would stop speaking to me and stop eating what I cooked.
We would sleep in the same bed, and he would act like I wasn't in it.
At work he picked at my patrol routes, and he corrected me in front of the other wolves.
It ended only when I crawled to him.
When I said I was wrong and cried and begged him to forgive me.
I used to do it within a day.
I used to do anything to make it stop.
Tonight I stayed where I was.
I listened to him running the shower, and I felt very calm.
I was tired of it, that was all.
He was an enforcer and I was tactical, and he said Alpha had a rule against us bonding.
So we hid, in a cabin at the edge of pack lands.
Rhett wrote the duty rosters for both our units.
In four years my shifts had never matched the Alpha's once, and I had never stood alone in a room with Torsten Redmond.
I called that luck.
Every few months I begged Rhett to ask the Alpha for an exception.
He always said yes. Then he found a reason to wait.
In front of the others he joked that I was getting too old to be picky, and should look at a widower.
I laughed too, every time.
In three days it would be four years exactly since the night we got together.
Last solstice he had put his hand on my chest and sworn on the Moon.
This anniversary he would meet my parents. This year he would tell the pack.
I already knew he wouldn't.
After midnight, with Rhett asleep on his side of the bed, I went to his desk for the box of tape I had seen him use.
The duty roster for next month was under it, and under the roster was a typed page with his handwriting in the margin.
It had a header: Declaration of Courtship, Cedarfall Moot.
Under it, in his careful writing: Rhett Sawyer and Jodie Ashcroft.
The date was nine days away.
At the bottom he had left himself a note: Present Jodie with the bracelet.
I knew that bracelet.
I had bought it for him three years ago, with the date engraved inside.
He had told me he lost it on a run last spring.
I read the page twice, put it back exactly as I found it, and picked up the tape.
I didn't cry this time.
So I started packing.
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