My Alpha Expected Me to Read His Mind, So I Left His Pack novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Founders' Supper
At the pack's yearly supper Ansel announces a three-month trip the other four have known about for weeks; Freja asks for her release, and he answers: no.
Ansel tapped his fork against his glass, and eighty wolves in Garrick Hall went quiet.
"I leave for Denver on Monday," he said. "The Council wants me for three months."
He said it to the room, flat and short.
Emmett put a hand on his chest and bowed to the tables.
"I'll hold the territory," Emmett said. "Try not to miss me too much."
The whole hall laughed.
I stood behind my chair at the head table with a tray of clinic schedules in my hands.
Three months of Ansel's appointments sat in my planner, and not one of them mentioned Denver.
I had worked beside him every day since the spring.
I looked at Nolan, who studied his plate.
I looked at Emmett, who was still smiling.
Cordelia caught my eye from the seat beside Ansel's and laughed out loud, warm and delighted.
"Freja, your face!" she said. "Oh, you didn't know? You always know."
People near us chuckled, because it was true.
For ten years the five of us had followed one rule nobody ever said aloud: we didn't talk about plans.
Where we'd eat, when we'd leave, who would drive, who would pay.
I guessed.
I had guessed Friday dinners, hospital runs, the night Emmett's truck broke down at the state line and we all showed up at the same gas station at midnight.
In ten years I had never once guessed wrong where they would be.
Everyone called it "knowing each other."
Nobody had ever asked what it cost to be the only one doing the knowing.
I set the tray down on the table very carefully.
"How long have you all known?" I asked.
Nobody answered, so I asked it again.
"Since the Council letter came," Nolan said. He still wouldn't look up. "Five weeks."
Five weeks of Friday dinners.
Five weeks of Ansel signing my forms and handing back the pen without a word.
"It's not a big deal, Had," Cordelia said, reaching over to squeeze my wrist. "It's how we are. You'd have felt it if it mattered."
Her hand was kind, and her voice was kind.
She had brought me soup when I had the flu in March and she had held my hair back after Emmett's birthday party.
I believed her.
That was the worst part, standing there.
I believed that I was the one who had failed to feel it.
Then I looked at Ansel.
He sat very still with his hand flat on the table, and he had not said a single word to me.
His eyes were on my face the whole time.
He had stood from his chair before I came through the doors that night, the way he always did.
He always seemed to know when I was near.
He had never once told me why.
"Ansel," I said. "Did you want me to find out like this?"
He opened his mouth.
Then he closed it.
The hall waited, and the silence went on one second too long.
Odessa, his grandmother, shifted in her rocking chair by the fireplace and watched us over her knitting.
I knew then what I would do.
I took off the pack pin from my collar, the little silver wolf his mother had given me when I was sixteen and had no home.
I set it on the table next to his glass.
"Alpha Garrick," I said. "I am asking for my release."
The hall made a sound.
The law was old and everyone in that room knew it.
A wolf could leave the pack only if the Alpha said her release out loud, in front of witnesses.
All he had to do was say it.
"Freja, sit down," Cordelia said, half laughing, half pleading. "You're upset. Let's talk about this tomorrow."
"I'd rather say it tonight," I said. "Out loud. In front of everyone."
I turned back to Ansel.
"Ten years of guessing what you wanted," I said. "I'm asking you to tell me one thing, plainly. Do I stay or do I go?"
Emmett had stopped smiling.
Nolan had finally looked up.
Ansel's jaw worked, and his eyes had gone from grey to gold.
Every wolf at the tables saw it.
Then, in front of all eighty of them, for the first time in ten years, Ansel Garrick answered me with a word I had not had to guess.
"No."
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