I Saw My Alpha Mate's Betrayal, So I Changed Fate novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Photo
Faye's camera shows her Alpha mate putting a ring on her adopted sister's scarred hand at their bonding in three days; she rejects him in front of her family and walks out, and her first self-portrait comes out black.
My grandmother's camera shows people three days from now.
On Wednesday night I sat on the stairs with it in my lap and took a picture of everyone I loved.
My bonding was Saturday at moonrise.
I wanted to see it before it happened.
My parents were on the couch with the seating chart.
I pressed the shutter.
The photo slid out warm, and I fanned it until the gray cleared.
Saturday, my mother and father stood in the Moon Grove under the old cedars, holding hands and crying.
The happy kind.
My twin brother, Lowell, was at the kitchen counter eating cereal out of the box.
Click.
Saturday, he was crouched behind me in the grove, fixing the train of my dress and grinning.
I already had Sophie's from the fitting that afternoon.
Saturday, my best friend was in her green bridesmaid dress, filming me, mascara running.
Everyone was happy.
Everyone was exactly where they should be.
Damien was out on the back porch on a call, pacing the boards.
My Alpha. My mate since I was eighteen.
I lifted the camera and took his picture through the screen door.
Then I watched it develop, and my stomach dropped.
Saturday, Damien stood in the grove in his black suit, sliding a ring onto a woman's hand.
It wasn't my hand.
I knew my own hands. I'd held this camera with them since I was nine.
This hand had a thin white scar across the middle knuckle.
Only one wolf in the Silverfir Pack had a scar like that.
My sister, Iris.
I held the picture to the lamp and tilted it every way.
The scar stayed.
I went upstairs without feeling the steps.
Iris's door was half open. She sat at her vanity in a silk robe, brushing out her hair with her face turned away.
I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.
The picture came out in my hand while I stood in her doorway.
Iris and Damien, on the big bed in his house.
The bed I had picked out. The quilt I had paid for.
Her robe was off one shoulder, and his mouth was on her collarbone.
I backed away from the door.
"Iris? You still up?"
Lowell's voice, on the stairs.
I slipped around the corner into the dark by the linen closet and held my breath.
He went straight into her room and pushed the door almost shut.
"I'm so nervous," Iris said in her small, sweet voice. "What if Faye gets upset?"
Lowell laughed.
"Faye? She'll hand you anything. She always has."
I bit my lip until I tasted blood.
He was right. That was the worst part.
Nine years ago, my parents and Damien brought Iris home from the Northern Pack after a raid killed her family.
She was fourteen and wouldn't speak. They told me she was my sister now.
So she got the big room with the window seat, because she was afraid of the dark.
She got my place at the pack academy in Helena, because she cried for a week.
She got my birthday money and my good boots.
Now she was getting Damien, and every one of them knew it.
"He'll do it in the grove," Lowell said. "In front of everybody. Cleaner than a breakup."
"And the ridge?" Iris asked.
"Signed and done. Damien says the strays will be gone by Sunday."
The ridge.
Gran's ridge, where her lookout still stood, and where her old stray Abel Cutler still kept the fire watch.
The ridge she left to me.
I didn't cry.
I went downstairs.
My parents looked up from the seating chart. Damien came in from the porch with his phone still in his hand.
I laid the two photos on the coffee table, face up.
My mother picked up the first one and went white.
My father didn't look at it at all.
That told me everything.
Damien glanced down and sighed.
"Faye. We were going to talk after the ceremony."
"You were going to tell me at the altar."
"I was going to keep it clean."
Lowell and Iris had come to the top of the stairs.
Iris pressed a hand to her mouth. The scarred one.
"Faye, I didn't want this," she whispered. "I swear I didn't."
My mother turned to me, and I saw it coming before she said a word.
"Honey, you've always had so much. She's never had anything of her own."
"He was mine."
"Then let him go gracefully," my father said. "For the pack."
So I let him go.
Not gracefully.
I looked Damien in the eye.
"I, Faye Dacre, reject you, Damien Stroud, as my mate."
The words hit the room.
The bond yanked under my ribs. Then it tore loose.
Damien staggered a step and caught the doorframe.
Lowell swore.
Iris began to sob, loud enough for the neighbors.
"You'll regret that."
"Not by Saturday."
I took Gran's camera, my truck keys and the old brass key to her lookout.
I didn't pack.
My mother called my name once from the porch.
Nobody followed me.
At the trailhead below Signal Ridge, I sat on my tailgate under a fat white moon and shook.
I had never taken my own picture.
Gran told me never to. She never said why.
I turned the camera around, looked into the lens and pressed the shutter.
The photo slid out. I waited for the gray to clear.
It didn't.
It stayed black. Every corner, every edge.
I had taken one black photo in my whole life.
It was of Gran, three days before we buried her.
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