He Bred My Sister, So I Chose the Man He Fears novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Reading
At her own marking Natalya reads her sister's pup, says the sire is her mate, lays down the Nose cord and walks out; a stranger's hand holds her up on the ice and she gets in his truck.
I read nine women at the fire before I came to my sister.
Each one stood in front of me with her coat open, and I put my face to her collar and breathed.
That is a nose's work in my pack.
Every year on the longest night, our nose reads each unmarked woman we have.
She says aloud who is carrying and whose pup it is, and she may never hold a reading back.
I had worn my grandmother's braided cord since March, when she died and left it to me.
"Clear," I said to the ninth woman, and the old women on the bench by the stove nodded.
Knut stood at the hearth stone in his good wool coat.
He had put off marking me at the autumn run because of his father.
When I finished the line he would bite my shoulder in front of the whole pack, and I would be his.
He smiled at me across the fire, easy and warm.
Larisa was last in the line.
She is twenty-two and my little sister, and she had on the green coat I bought her in October.
She was grinning.
"Hurry up, Talya," she said. "You've got a mate to catch."
I leaned in to her collar.
Under the woodsmoke and her vanilla shampoo there was something sweet and tight and new.
It was a pup, about four weeks along.
My grandmother needed six weeks to read a pup, and I need four.
Then I smelled what was inside the pup.
Cedar oil, cold salt off the inlet, and the warm place under a man's jaw.
I knew that smell.
I had put my face in that place for three years.
"Talya," Larisa said.
She had stopped grinning.
"Don't."
That was how I knew it was not a mistake.
I stood there with the cord on my neck and two hundred people waiting and the fire cracking behind me.
For one breath I wanted to say, Clear.
I wanted it so badly that my mouth began to make the word.
But a Nose who holds back a reading is no Nose, and my grandmother said so the day she hung the cord on me.
I stepped back and spoke loud enough for the end of the lot.
"Larisa Kuzmin carries. Four weeks. The sire is Knut Halvorsen."
Nobody moved.
Then the sound started, low, from every direction at once.
Knut did not look at my sister.
He looked at me.
"Read it again, Natalya," he said.
His voice was gentle.
"I read once," I said. "I don't read twice."
"You're upset. It's a big night. Anyone would get a scent wrong."
"The Alpha doesn't call a Nose's reading a lie."
That was one of the old women of the Kitchen, the bench by the stove in the Cache House where the oldest in the pack keep our rules.
She did not stand up.
She only looked at Knut until he stopped talking.
Larisa began to cry.
She did not say she was sorry.
She said, "It wasn't supposed to come out like this."
That told me the rest.
I lifted the cord over my head.
It was warm from my neck.
I walked to the hearth and laid it on the stone at Knut's boots.
"Read your own pups from now on," I said.
"Talya." He caught my sleeve. "The Dark Heat starts at midnight. You won't get as far as the highway."
I took my sleeve out of his hand.
"Then I'll get as far as I get."
I walked through the pack and nobody stopped me.
One old woman on the Kitchen bench put out two fingers and touched my coat as I passed, and that was all.
The lot behind the Cache House was glare ice under one floodlight.
At the far end stood the flatbed of the Interior hauler who brings our Solstice birch.
I had seen him at three Solstices.
He never came inside.
He stood by his truck with his hands in his coat and watched the fire from the dark.
I had never been able to place his smell, and I had always told myself it was the diesel.
Halfway across, my boot went out from under me.
A hand closed on the back of my neck and held me up.
It covered my whole nape, from my hairline down to the top of my spine.
It was very warm through my hair.
"Got you," he said.
His voice was low and slow.
I turned my face into his wrist and breathed.
I have read every wolf from Homer to Soldotna by the collar.
I stood against this man and smelled nothing.
No sweat, no soap, no wood, no diesel.
Nothing at all.
"You're Axel," I said. "You bring the birch."
"Axel Brandvik. Yes," he said.
"I can't smell you."
"People say that."
Low in my belly, the first heat of the Dark Heat began to burn.
It was not midnight yet, but it was close.
Behind us Knut's voice rose over the pack's low noise, calling my name.
"I need to be somewhere he can't scent me," I said. "For nine nights."
Axel looked over my head at the fire, and at the man by it.
His hand stayed on my neck.
"I've got my grandfather's cabin on Skilak Lake," he said. "Ninety minutes. It's quiet out there."
"Is there a door that locks?"
"Yes," he said.
"Then I'm coming."
He opened the passenger door of the cab and stepped back to give me room.
I climbed up myself, and I shut the door behind me.
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