I Don't Need No Alpha Brothers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Choosing
On the night she's to choose a husband from the Alpha's five sons, all five refuse Lainey in front of the pack, so she cuts her palm and severs the bond, and the Alpha declares her fair game until moonset.
Five men stood in a row under the Hunter's Moon, and I was supposed to pick one of them to marry.
The whole Larch Ridge pack had packed into the timber hall to watch.
Two hundred wolves in their good clothes, with the big doors open so the moonlight came in across the floor.
I'd known all five of the Brodie sons since I was seven.
I'd learned to swim with them, fight with them, and lie to their father with them.
Tonight I was going to choose Beckett, because everybody knew I would.
Conrad Brodie stood on the dais behind his sons with his hand on the oath knife.
He was the man I'd pulled out of the Tamarack River when I was a little girl.
He'd raised me as his own and sworn in front of this same pack that I'd choose a husband from his sons and be their Luna.
He caught my eye and smiled.
"Go on, little river," he said.
I walked down the line in my blue dress, past the twins, past the second son, past Lorne.
I stopped in front of Beckett.
He was looking over my head at the doors.
"Beckett Brodie," I said. "I choose you."
He didn't take my hand.
"No," he said.
The hall went so quiet I heard the moths hitting the lamps.
"I won't marry a girl who tried to drown someone," Beckett said, loud enough for the back rows.
Somebody near the doors made a small, wet sound.
Delaney Gaffney.
She'd come to Larch Ridge in July with her father's ashes in a cardboard box, and the whole pack had taken her in.
In August she'd come back from the falls pool soaked to the skin, with bruises on both arms and my green scarf in her fist.
She'd told everyone I held her under.
I hadn't been within a mile of the falls that day.
Nobody had asked me where I was.
"I never touched her," I said. "You know I didn't."
Beckett finally looked at me.
His blue eyes were flat as a frozen pond.
"I know what I saw her look like when we pulled her out."
He stepped back off the line.
I turned to the second son.
He wouldn't meet my eyes, and he stepped back too.
The twins went together, the way they did everything.
One of them muttered, "Sorry, Lainey," and the other elbowed him.
That left Lorne.
Lorne, who'd shared his lunch with me every day in second grade.
Lorne, who'd held my hair back the first time I shifted and threw up afterward.
His face was white.
He glanced at Beckett, and Beckett gave him one small nod.
Lorne stepped back.
I stood alone in the middle of the hall in the dress I'd saved for a year to buy.
I looked up at Conrad.
He was the Alpha. He'd sworn the promise. One word from him and this would stop.
He took his hand off the knife.
"The pack has spoken," he said. "A promise to a girl who'd hurt one of our own isn't a promise I'll keep."
He held his hand out past me.
"Delaney, come up here. You'll stand in the Choosing tonight."
Delaney walked up the aisle in a white dress.
A white dress.
She'd known.
She passed me close enough that her shoulder brushed mine, and she smelled of my shampoo.
She took Beckett's hand.
Beckett kissed her knuckles.
The pack started to clap, slowly at first, then all of them.
I had two choices.
I could stand there and cry while they clapped.
Or I could do something they'd remember.
I walked up onto the dais.
Conrad frowned. "Lainey. Go home. We'll talk tomorrow."
"No, we won't."
I picked up the oath knife.
It was the same knife he'd held fifteen years ago when he swore I'd be Luna here.
I drew it across my left palm.
The cut stung, then burned, then poured.
I held my bleeding hand up so every wolf in the hall could see it.
"I was born Lainey Ketter," I said. "My parents never belonged to this pack, and neither do I."
The hall went silent.
Every wolf in there knew what blood and those words did.
"I cut the bond," I said. "I cut it from this pack, from this Alpha, and from every one of his sons."
It went like a rope snapping inside my chest.
For fifteen years there had been a warm hum at the back of my head, two hundred heartbeats that weren't mine.
Now there was nothing.
I staggered, and nobody reached for me.
Lorne took one step forward.
Beckett put an arm out and stopped him.
I laid the knife down on the table and wiped my hand on the blue dress.
"Keep the dress," I told Delaney. "It's a better fit than his promise."
Then I walked toward the doors.
"Lainey."
Conrad's voice stopped me on the threshold.
It wasn't the warm voice he'd used all my life.
"You cut your bond on Larch Ridge land," he said. "You know the law."
I did know it.
A severed wolf on pack land was fair game for the hunt until she left it.
I turned around.
He looked past me at the moon over the trees, and then at his sons.
"Until moonset," Conrad said.
The twins were already pulling their shirts over their heads.
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