He Staged My Funeral, Now His Wolf Howls at My Door novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Cuffs
Lydia asks politely to see Hazel's cuffs, a guard burns them, Marla is shoved into a cart, Eamon salves Lydia's unmarked hand with Hazel's own medicine, and Hazel signs her own erasure. He tells her to drink all of it, and calls her Hazel for the first time.
Lydia Crane picked up my mating cuffs in front of my whole lab, and every person in the room let her.
She came in at noon with two guards behind her and a cream coat folded over her arm.
I knew who she was. The whole tower had known since breakfast.
She was the woman Alpha Eamon Mackay had never let go, home at last from six years in the northern cells.
"Dr. Brennan?"
Her voice was soft and a little hoarse.
"I'm sorry to walk in on you. They told me your serums kept his soldiers alive."
"Some of them," I said. "My second-in-command made the rest."
She stood beside the centrifuge with her arms crossed.
"Hello," she said, and did not smile.
Lydia smiled for both of them.
She asked what the green serum was for, and she listened to the answer.
She said the wolfsbane work must have cost me a lot of sleep.
She was kind, and I liked her for about four minutes.
Then she saw the shelf.
My cuffs sat in the middle of it, where I had left them that morning after buffing out the scratches.
Eamon had clamped them on my wrists our first winter together.
The steel was soaked in his scent, and he said it would keep my wolf steady.
I had worn them for three years, until the metal wore thin.
"Oh," Lydia said, and put a hand flat on her chest. "He drew these for me. For my eighteenth birthday."
Her eyes filled.
"I never thought I'd see them again. Do you mind if I hold them?"
I should have said yes or no. I said nothing, and she lifted them off the shelf.
She held them for a long moment, and then she turned her face away.
"I can't look at them on somebody else's shelf. I'm so sorry. Could someone please take them out of my sight?"
The nearer guard lit a blowtorch.
Blue flame hissed across the lab.
"Stop!" Marla, my second-in-command, lunged for the steel.
The other guard swung the heavy handle of his torch at her head.
A large hand caught his wrist in the air.
Eamon had come in without a sound.
He threw the guard aside, and Marla went down with him into a steel cart.
The cart crashed over and sprayed glass across the floor.
His Alpha command rolled through the room, and my wolf flattened inside me.
In three years he had never once used that command near me. I used to call that gentleness.
Behind him, the cuffs slumped into a black puddle on the tile.
"Eamon." Lydia held up her palm. "I touched the metal. It burns."
I could see her palm from where I stood. It was not red.
He took a tin from his coat pocket and thumbed salve over the clean skin.
It was my salve.
I had boiled the herbs by hand every time he came home from a border fight bleeding, and it was the last tin on the coast.
She pushed her sleeve up for him, and her wrist was smooth all the way to the elbow.
Six years in cells, and not one mark.
I noticed. Then Marla groaned on the floor, and I stopped noticing.
I knelt and checked her pupils and her pulse.
She had a cut across her scalp and was swearing steadily, which was a good sign.
"Brennan." Eamon put the tin away. "Are you finished?"
"Marla needs stitches."
"Then stitch her, and then listen."
He sent Lydia and the guards out with one look, and the door shut.
"You'll sign the revocation now. The registry wipes your name from the West Coast in three minutes."
The vial he meant sat next to my monitor, full of dark liquid.
"Tomorrow at the ceremony you reject the bond. You drink what's on your desk, and you go down in front of everyone."
"My men carry you out before sunrise," he said. "You'll be in Florida with a new name."
"Nothing will touch you. I've arranged every step."
"You asked to see your family once more. Your ex-husband drives you at eight tonight."
Three years of full moons went through my head.
Every one of them, he held me until dawn.
By morning he was calm and I couldn't lift my arms for a day.
He told me it was my old scars and my weak wolf, and I believed him.
He had never marked me. He had told me he wanted a real ceremony after the war.
I picked up the tablet he held out.
The screen showed my name and a single line: Revocation of identity, West Coast registry.
Marla pushed herself up on one elbow, her face white.
"Doc, don't."
"Lie still."
So I signed.
The word REVOKED flashed red, and my name was gone from the only home I had left.
Eamon took the tablet and walked to the door.
He stopped with his hand on the frame and did not turn around.
"Drink all of it, Hazel," he said. "Half won't be enough."
In three years he had never called me by my first name.
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