Leaving My Alpha Husband in Ice Cold Regret novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Anniversary Table
At the pack's anniversary dinner Ilse seats Delphine as second hearth, Lucan admits the affair, and Neve calls the Frost Rite on him in front of everyone, ending on the cost she already knows.
On the night of our fifth anniversary, my husband's mother told the whole pack my womb was closed.
She said it standing at the head of the long table, with a glass of elderberry wine in her hand.
I was sitting at the Luna's place, in the green dress Lucan had picked out for me three years ago.
Sixty wolves of the Hollow Pine pack had turned to look at me.
The hall smelled of venison, woodsmoke and cold pine.
Outside, snow was coming down so hard the windows had gone white.
"We have waited five winters," Ilse Harrow said. "The pack needs a Harrow pup, and the Moon has not sent one."
She said it kindly.
"So the elders have agreed," she went on. "Tonight Delphine Rooke will be seated as second hearth."
Nobody gasped.
That was the part I noticed first.
Sixty people, and not one of them was surprised.
Delphine rose from the bench beside Ilse, in her lilac cardigan, with her honey-blond hair pulled into its smooth tail.
She worked beside me at the pack clinic every day.
She had brewed me a morning tea for months, and I had thanked her for it.
Now she lowered her blue eyes and smiled at the tablecloth.
"I'll try to deserve it," she said softly.
I looked at the empty chair at my right.
My husband's chair.
The Alpha of Hollow Pine was forty minutes late to his own anniversary.
The big double doors opened.
Cold air rolled down the hall and the candle flames bent flat.
Lucan came in shaking snow from his black hair, six foot four of him, with his gold-ringed eyes already searching for mine.
He had a coat over one arm.
He was carrying a smell I knew better than my own name.
Chamomile.
It hung on his collar.
Eleven days ago I had found a lilac silk scarf folded in the footwell of his truck.
I had put it back exactly where it was.
I had said nothing for eleven days, and I had spent every one of those nights at the clinic reading the oldest law the pack owns.
Lucan reached the table and stopped.
He looked at his mother.
He looked at Delphine, standing there with her hands folded.
He looked at me.
I waited for him to say, This is a mistake.
I waited for him to say, Mother, sit down.
My husband said nothing.
His jaw worked once, and he looked at the floor.
That was his answer, and sixty wolves watched him give it.
I stood up.
My chair scraped the boards, loud as a gunshot.
"How long?" I asked.
Lucan's head came up.
"Neve, not here."
"You brought her here," I said. "Your mother brought her here. How long?"
The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the fire settle in the grate.
"Since the autumn," Lucan said.
Four months.
I nodded as though it were an answer I could do something with.
My wolf was somewhere deep in my chest, pacing, and under my ribs the mate bond burned.
I could feel him through it.
Guilt, and under the guilt, relief.
He was relieved it was out.
He thought the worst part was over.
"Sit down, dear," Ilse said. "You're upset. Everyone understands. A Luna's duty is to the pack, and the pack needs heirs."
"Does it need a Luna who can't give them?" Delphine added, so gently.
I took off my wedding ring.
It was a thin band of Osterberg silver, my grandmother's, and it came off easily after five years.
I set it on the white tablecloth between the candles.
Then I put my hand over the mark on the side of my neck, where his teeth had gone in the night he claimed me.
"Lucan Harrow," I said, loud enough for the back benches.
"I stand before the pack as the one you wronged."
Somebody at the far end dropped a fork.
I saw the old herbalist in her high-backed chair near the fire sit up very straight.
"I call the Frost Rite," I said.
The silence after that was a different silence.
Ilse's face went the color of candle wax.
"Child," she said. "Nobody in this pack has called the Rite in sixty years. Half who call it die."
"Then I'll be the other half," I said.
Lucan took a step toward me, both hands out.
"Neve. Listen to me." His voice cracked on my name. "It takes the wolf. It freezes the betrayer's wolf in the lake. Do you understand what you're asking for?"
"Yes."
"It could kill you. The lake stops your heart."
"I know."
"You can't know that. You've never even been near it."
I looked at him, at the man I had loved since I was twenty-two.
I felt the bond pull in my chest and I let it.
"I read the law the night I found her scarf in your truck," I said.
His face emptied out.
"That's right," I said. "Eleven days. I've had time to learn the words."
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