His Mate, Her Choice novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Long Night
In the cellar Wynn finds her name erased from the pack's books, steals the original roll, and the Alpha King walks down the stairs and calls her his mate.
The Alpha King's black cars were already in the yard when Alpha Halvard came down to the cellar.
He dropped a stack of loose pages on my desk without looking at me.
"Fair copies," he said. "Every war roll since the eastern raids."
"Yes, Alpha."
"The King's clerks will want to see our books tonight. They will see clean ones."
He went back up the stairs.
I was twenty years old, and I had copied the pack's records in this cellar for eight years.
I wrote them all in a small clean hand by one oil lamp, because the Alpha would not pay for electricity in a room only a ward used.
His wife came down a few minutes later with my nightly cup of tea.
She had brought it every night since I was twelve.
"Drink it all, dear," she said. "It will be a long night, and you'll want to sleep after."
"Is it true the King is staying until the full moon?"
"It is. And he'll look hard at everyone upstairs." She smoothed my collar and smiled. "You needn't worry. No one will ask who you are. I've seen to that."
The tea was bitter, the way it always was.
I drank half and poured the rest into the dust behind the desk, which I had been doing since I was fifteen.
Luna Ottilie went up again, and I opened the box of war rolls.
Halvard's draft of the Hollowmere raid was on top.
I knew his handwriting. I had been reading it for eight years.
Under it, in the box where it had always been, lay the original roll in the old elder's spidery hand, the ink gone brown.
At the foot was the stub of a broken wax seal, a half moon over a spear.
I had asked about it once, at fourteen. Halvard had told me it was the old Alpha's mark and to mind my own work.
I had copied that roll once before.
Twenty-one children were taken from the Hollowmere Pack eight years ago, in the autumn.
Twenty-one names. Mine was the eleventh.
I laid Halvard's draft beside the roll and checked them line by line, because that is my work.
His draft had twenty-one names too.
Nineteen matched. Beside each, in his tidy new ink, he had written what became of them.
Adopted. Ranked. Mated and left the pack. Initiated.
The eleventh name on his draft was a boy called Tam.
Tam had died of a fever the first winter. He had shared his blanket with me in the cart.
Tam was seventeenth on the roll, not eleventh.
On the seventeenth line of Halvard's draft, where Tam belonged, he had written a name I had never heard in my life.
Brin. Adopted by kin in the east.
There had never been a Brin.
I read the eleventh line again. Then I looked for my own name on his page, and it was not there.
The old roll had me. The new one had a dead boy in my place and an invented girl at the end.
Somebody who read only Halvard's pages would never know a Wynn had existed.
They had not kept me in the cellar by accident.
Upstairs the cars were still arriving. Doors opened and shut, and the pack's voices rose and fell across the yard.
The clerks would be here within the hour, and they would open this box.
I could leave the roll where it was and copy Halvard's page, as I had been told.
I could be the clean book they wanted.
I looked at the brown paper in my hands for a long time.
So I took it.
I folded the roll twice, slid it under my shirt against my ribs, and laid a blank sheet the same size in the bottom of the box.
My hands were steady. That surprised me.
I had just put the draft back on top when the cellar door opened above me and the whole house went quiet.
Boots came down the stairs, a lot of them.
Alpha Halvard came first, then Luna Ottilie, then their son Fenn, who had never once come down here without being sent.
Behind them came a tall man in a dark coat with snow on his shoulders.
Every wolf in the stairwell flattened against the wall to let him pass.
He stopped on the last step.
He had not looked at the books or at the Alpha beside him.
He was looking at me, and his eyes had gone from grey to gold.
"Mate," said the Alpha King.
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