My Alpha Killed Our Pup for His Pregnant Mistress novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Moon Stone
At the Gathering Torin announces his dead brother's widow carries his pup, orders Fern to apologize for a threat she never made, and sends her to kneel on the Moon Stone; she loses her own pup before dawn.
Torin had kept my cold hand warm inside his arm all evening at the pack's autumn gathering, and he still had it there when he made the announcement from the dais.
"My brother's widow is carrying a pup," he said. "Mine."
Two hundred wolves stopped talking at once.
Then the pack started to cheer, because they loved her, and because nobody had cheered for a pup in the Dray house in five years.
I took my hand off his sleeve.
His brother's widow climbed the dais steps in a cream cardigan with her hand on her stomach.
An hour earlier she had wrapped her own shawl around my shoulders and told me my fingers were ice.
She had rubbed her lavender salve into my wrists, the way she had every week since autumn.
I still smelled it on my skin.
Torin put his palm flat over her belly for the whole pack to see.
That morning he had kissed my forehead and said, "Whatever Margo needs, it doesn't change anything between us."
I had believed him, because I had a secret of my own and I was saving it for tonight.
I stepped off the dais to get water and to breathe.
Torin called the pack to the moon the way he did at every Gathering, and the answering howl came back thin and ragged.
At the last Gathering it had shaken the windows.
He looked back at me over his shoulder and said, "Fern. Stay close."
I climbed back up and stood beside him, and the howl swelled until the glass hummed.
I thought it was grief for his dead brother finally breaking open. I thought nothing else.
"Torin," I said under the noise. "I need to tell you something tonight. It's good."
"Not now," he said.
Margo's eyes filled. She turned to the pack and said, "I'm afraid, though. I need the Luna to promise she won't hurt us."
The cheering thinned.
"Hurt you?" I said.
"In the kitchen on Tuesday." Her voice shook. "You said you'd cut it out of me before I took your place."
I had brought her chamomile on Tuesday. We had laughed about her cravings.
"I never said that," I told the pack, and then Torin. "Torin, I never said that."
He turned his whole body to face me, and the Alpha's weight came down on my shoulders.
"Margo is grieving and she is carrying my pup," he said. "You will apologize to her. That is an order."
The order closed my throat.
My wolf, Sorrel, whined and bent, and my mouth said, "I'm sorry, Margo," in a voice I didn't choose.
Two hundred faces watched me say it.
"I'm fourteen weeks pregnant," I said. It came out flat and loud. "Dessa has the scan. Torin, I'm carrying your pup too."
He stared at me. I saw him think about it for one breath.
"You heard her cry," he said. "And now you've got a pup of your own, right on time."
"It's true."
"I'd smell it."
"It doesn't show until sixteen weeks. Ask Dessa."
"Enough." His voice dropped to the low register that moved wolves. "You'll kneel on the Moon Stone until dawn, and you'll mean the apology by then. Nobody brings you a blanket. Nobody speaks to you."
I knelt where he pointed.
The Moon Stone sits in the middle of the courtyard, a slab of granite that is cold in July.
It was November, and the sleet started before the pack had gone in.
Dessa came across the yard twice and a guard turned her back both times.
By midnight I couldn't feel my knees.
At three the cramp came, low and hard.
I couldn't stand, because the order held my legs, so I stayed on the stone and said Sorrel's name until she stopped answering.
I said the pup's name too, the one I had been saving to tell Torin.
The blood ran down my legs and onto the granite, and the sleet washed it toward the drain.
Nobody came.
At dawn the order let go all at once and I fell sideways.
Torin crossed the courtyard in his charcoal coat with Margo on his arm.
He looked down. He stepped over the dark patch beside my knee and didn't ask what it was.
"Clean yourself up," he said. "Breakfast is at eight. Margo wants the family at the table."
Margo's eyes slid over me, and she touched her stomach and looked away.
I lay on the stone and watched them go in.
Then I got up on my own, which took a long time.
So I walked to the Elders' hall instead of the kitchen, and I knocked until the old elder opened the door in his dressing gown.
"I want the writ for a mate severance," I said. "Today."
He looked at the blood on my dress and didn't ask either.
"It needs two witnesses who will sign," he said. "Who do you have?"
"Dessa."
"That's one."
Boots crossed the hall behind me.
"Put me down for the second," said Kurt Kingscote, the guest Alpha from Cinder Creek, who had stood at the back of the Gathering all night and watched me kneel.
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