I Cut My Alpha's Bond, So the Lycan King Came Hunting novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Seat
Cassia's husband seats another woman in her chair and offers her the gate post for life. She cuts the binding in front of the pack, puts three enforcers down, and the wards stop hiding her from the howl on the ridge.
My husband gave my seat to another woman in front of three hundred wolves.
He did it between the soup and the roast, with his glass raised, smiling.
I stood in the doorway of the great hall with a tray of bread in my hands.
The long tables were full for the autumn feast.
Every pack Alpha in the north range sat along the dais, and a visiting Alpha's daughter sat in my chair.
She wore my green dress.
I knew it was mine because I had let the hem down myself.
"Cass," my husband called across the hall. "Come up here. We're all friends."
Nobody laughed.
A girl from the kitchens took the tray out of my hands and whispered that she was sorry.
"Don't be," I said.
I counted the room, which is a habit I can't turn off.
Four doors.
Two windows, both barred.
Eleven enforcers along the walls, and every one of them had been told something before I walked in.
I walked up the length of the hall, and the talk thinned out until I could hear my boots.
His father, the Marshal, stood behind his chair in a grey coat.
He had stood behind that chair for three years.
"Halvard is binding the Silverlake Alpha's daughter tonight," Ansgar Eckert said, warmly, for the benefit of the room. "It's for the alliance. Nothing personal, Cassia."
"Nothing personal," my husband, Halvard, agreed.
He didn't meet my eyes.
He hadn't looked at me properly since the morning after our binding.
I wore his mark on the inside of my left wrist, and in three years he had touched it twice.
"And me?" I asked.
Halvard lifted an iron key on a chain.
"You'll keep the ridge gate," he said. "You know the stones better than anyone. You'd sleep in the gatehouse, so you're close."
"Close to what?"
"To the gate," Ansgar said gently.
Then I understood it.
My blood on the gate stones every night, for the rest of my life, in a stone hut by the road.
The seat and the name were for the alliance, and I was the lock.
The Silverlake girl looked down at her plate.
At least she had the decency to be ashamed.
"I see," I said.
I reached down to my boot and took out the Warden knife.
It was the only thing my mother had left me, a short black blade with a plain bone grip.
Two enforcers came off the wall at once.
"Stand easy," I said. "I'm not hurting anybody who doesn't want it."
I laid my left wrist on the white tablecloth, mark up.
Halvard's smile finally slipped.
"Cass. Don't."
"Halvard Eckert," I said, loud enough for the back tables. "I cut what we bound."
The old words came out steady.
I drew the blade across the mark.
It was a clean cut and it burned all the way to my shoulder.
"Cassia Coleridge, I cut what we bound."
Blood ran onto the cloth, and the mark under it split and went grey.
The whole hall stopped.
I heard a fork hit a plate somewhere near the back.
"Hold her," Ansgar said.
He didn't raise his voice.
He never needed to.
Three enforcers came at me from three sides.
They were big men, and none of them had fought anyone sober.
The first reached for my arm.
I turned his wrist until the elbow locked and put him on the floor with his own weight.
The second took a chair to the knee and went down with a shout.
The third got a hand on my collar, and I stepped inside it and put my forearm across his throat until his eyes rolled.
I let him slide to the stones.
It took no more than a few breaths.
I was not even winded.
The silence after was a different one.
"Fourth Ranger Company," a voice said at the back, an old man's voice. "That's a Ranger's takedown."
"Sergeant," I said, to nobody in particular. "Border Guard, scout-sniper. You can ask your Marshal why he never mentioned it."
Faces turned toward Ansgar.
His mouth had gone flat.
Then Halvard made a sound.
It was a bad sound, low and wet, and it came from deep in his chest.
He gripped the edge of the table and the wood cracked under his hands.
His shoulders jerked, and I heard bone move.
"That's the slip," I said to the room, because somebody had to. "It comes when a binding is cut. It'll pass."
I did not tell them that I felt it too, a hollow place under my ribs where he used to be.
Ansgar stepped around his son and came close enough that I could smell the cedar on his coat.
"You will not leave this valley," he said, very quietly.
"Watch me."
I left the knife in the table, point down in the wood, and walked out.
Nobody stopped me.
My truck stood at the ridge gate with its tank full, where I had parked it at noon.
In the footwell lay a long canvas rifle case.
Sewn into its lining was a folded sheet of paper I had carried for nine years.
I put my hand on the gate stones.
For three years they had hidden my scent from every nose in the north range.
For three years the Lycan hunters had never found the Lowwater shooter.
The stones shuddered under my palm and went slack, and the cold night air came through.
From the far ridge, a long way off, a single howl rolled down the valley.
I had never heard it before.
I had been waiting nine years to hear it.
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