He Rejected Me Out Loud and Kept Other Women, So I Never Answered novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Settling
In the fish-house loft her father counts the debt aloud and Doran Gaskill takes the note, rejects her in front of the pack and a woman in a green coat laughs; Rhiannon does not say the words back, writes her own terms in the ledger and goes to her shift.
"I take the debt," Doran Gaskill said. "I do not take the girl."
The whole fish-house loft went silent around me.
I stood in my mother's navy dress with my hands folded in front of me and my father's hand still flat on my back.
An hour earlier he had counted my price out loud to the pack.
One hundred and forty thousand dollars on a boat yard he had lost on a card game, and the old words that settled it: we give the girl against the note.
The Alpha did not look at me.
He sat on the oak bench at the head of the room in his dead father's black oilskin coat, and he looked at the wall behind my head.
"She is not mine and she will never be mine," he said, in a voice that carried to the stairs.
"She sleeps in the net loft and eats what she earns."
"Any wolf who touches her answers to me, not to her."
Then he said the old plain words of rejection, clear enough for the back row.
They landed in my chest like a cold hand.
At his elbow a woman in a bottle-green wool coat laughed.
It was a small, pleased sound, and she put her glove over her mouth too late.
Doran did not turn his head.
He did not tell her to stop, and he did not look at me.
The whole pack looked at me instead.
On the Reach a rejection is only finished when the rejected wolf says the words back.
Two hundred wolves between the net racks were waiting for me to say them.
I had known the words since I was ten.
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
I had stood in that dress for an hour while my father priced me, and my voice was not going to be one more thing the Etheridges gave away.
The silence went on.
Somebody coughed at the back, and boots shifted on the planks.
In the front row Hester Ballance stood holding the pack's ledger open in both hands.
She was seventy-nine, small and bent, in a black wool coat, and she kept the law of the island in that book.
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she closed the ledger very slowly, and she looked at Doran instead of me.
Ambrose Gaskill, the Alpha's cousin, leaned in from the bench and murmured something in his ear, smiling.
I had paid my parents' electric and fuel and taxes since I was sixteen, and nobody had ever once asked me about any of it.
I walked across the floor to Hester.
"May I have the pen," I said.
"It's the pack's pen, child."
"Then I'll sign the pack's book."
She opened the ledger again.
The note was recorded on the page in my father's cramped hand, with Doran's name written under the debt in black ink.
I took the pen from its clip.
"Rhiannon," my father hissed behind me, and I did not turn around.
Doran had stood up from the bench.
He came down the steps without a sound and stopped three feet from my shoulder, still looking at the wall.
I smelled tar and cold salt and cedar smoke on his coat.
My hand was steady, which surprised me, and I wrote under the debt.
*Rhiannon Etheridge works off the note on the deck at her own wage, owes nothing else to any wolf on this island, and answers to no man's mark.*
I signed my name.
I held the pen out to Hester, and Doran reached past me and took it instead.
His fingers closed over mine for the length of a breath.
They were hot and rough, and they let go first.
He put the pen back in its clip and did not read what I had written.
"The ferry boards at the dock in an hour," I said to the room. "I'm on the deck crew, and I'd like to get to my shift."
I did not say one word to him.
I walked out through two hundred wolves, and they parted for me down the long stairs.
My mother stood against the wall with her cardigan buttoned wrong, and she would not meet my eyes.
My father called my name from the loft, and I kept walking.
At the dock the ferry was warming its engines in the last of the light.
I took my gloves out of my coat pocket and pulled them on.
I tucked my dress up under my work jacket and went aboard.
Halfway through the loading I felt someone watching me from the end of the pier.
I looked up with a coil of line over my shoulder.
Doran stood alone at the rail in his black coat, with the lanterns of the loft glowing behind him.
He was looking straight at me.
The second my eyes met his, he turned his back.
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