I Married the Alpha They Threw Away novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Midwife

At the village market Neve tells everyone where Corbin slept last night, and at closing time Hattie recognizes the ring from her foundling basket as the crest of a line that burned.

Hattie Lunn met me at the door of the birthing house with a mug in each hand.

"Well, if it isn't the Ruin's bride," she said. "Shut the door. You're famous."

She was sixty-four, stout, with a gray braid down her back and hands cracked red from forty years of scrubbing.

She'd taught me everything I knew about babies.

The last time I'd seen her, she'd been walking out of the Kingsbury house because Imogen told her to.

I took the mug so I wouldn't hug her.

"You're not going to tell me I'm crazy?"

"Oh, you're crazy." She sniffed my coffee and handed it back.

"But I've wanted somebody to put that boy on his back since he was nine. Did he cry?"

"A little."

"Good."

We had two mothers due that week and one baby with jaundice.

I weighed him, wrote it down, and kept my hands busy.

At noon Hattie sent me to the village market for gauze and oranges.

The market ran in the lot behind the hardware store.

Half the pack shopped there.

I knew it the second I walked in.

The talk dropped.

A woman pulled her little boy closer by the hood.

Two men at the honey stall stopped haggling and stared.

I picked out oranges.

"Look who's out in daylight," said a voice behind me.

Sienna Bracknell stood by the coffee cart in her white fur collar, holding a paper cup.

Corbin stood beside her with his hand on her lower back.

He'd gotten a haircut since last night.

He smiled at me.

"How's the north shore?" he asked the whole lot. "Does the Ruin let you in the house, or do you sleep with the dogs?"

People laughed.

Not all of them, but enough.

Sienna sipped her coffee and looked at my coat, which was Bram's, rolled four times at the cuffs.

"It's sweet, honestly," she said. "Charity cases sticking together."

In my first life, I'd have gone red and walked away.

I'd done it a hundred times in that house.

I set the oranges on the scale.

"Where'd you sleep last night, Corbin?"

His smile stayed exactly where it was.

"In my bed."

"No," I said. "You left the hall at twelve and drove to the Bracknell boathouse."

I didn't lower my voice.

"You took the back stairs because her father's dogs bark at the front ones. She opened the door in your shirt."

Sienna's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"And she told you not to worry about me," I went on, "because the foundling was only for a year."

Nobody in the lot was laughing now.

Those were Sienna's words, exactly.

She'd said them to me herself in my first life, when I was eight months pregnant, on my own porch, to watch my face.

Now I watched hers.

It went white under the makeup, then blotchy red.

She looked at Corbin.

It was the look of a woman wondering who he'd told.

"She's guessing," Corbin said.

"Then tell everyone where you were."

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came out of it.

The honey man coughed into his fist.

The woman with the little boy was openly smiling.

"Thought so," I said, and paid for my oranges.

Corbin caught up with me at the gauze stall, red to the ears.

"You think you're funny," he said low. "You think the Ruin can keep you?"

"I think he already did."

"Twenty-eight days, Neve." He leaned in until I could smell his aftershave.

"Then you come home and spend the rest of your life apologizing to my mother."

He walked off.

Sienna didn't follow him.

She stood by the coffee cart, staring at the back of his coat.

I carried the gauze and oranges back to the birthing house with my hands steady and my knees shaking.

Hattie took one look at me and laughed out loud.

"Oh, the whole street's heard," she said. "The boathouse. Lord. You'll make an old woman happy yet."

We worked through the afternoon.

The jaundice baby went home pink.

At closing time, Hattie locked the front door and turned off the lamp over the scale.

Then she stopped beside me at the sink.

"Let me see that," she said.

The ring had slipped out of my collar while I scrubbed.

I lifted the cord over my head and put it in her palm.

It was a small silver band, worn thin, with a crescent moon cut into the top.

Hattie held it up to the window.

The color left her face so fast I grabbed her elbow.

"Hattie."

"Where did you get this?"

"It was in my basket. Imogen found me under the larch tree by the pack hall. You know that. Everybody knows that."

Hattie's cracked fingers closed around the ring until her knuckles shook.

"That's the Silverborn crescent," she whispered. "I haven't seen one since the night their lodge burned."

She pressed it back into my hand.

"Neve, honey, nobody found you under any tree."

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