My Alpha Parents Gave My Tuition Away, So the Royal Command Took Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Founders' Night
The Alpha gives Linnea's tuition to her sister in front of the pack, and a Royal Command envoy reads her signed contract. The ward lamps dim as she walks out.
My father crossed the pack hall to the coat rack, laughed at the oil on my cuff, and squeezed my hand.
"Straight from the garage again. Good. Stay where you can hear this," he said, and went back to the front.
He tapped his glass with his signet ring, and the whole hall went quiet.
It was the pack's spring gathering, and two hundred wolves had their phones up to film him.
I stood in my good dress, with oil on the cuff I hadn't been able to scrub out.
My acceptance letter from the capital's technical university was folded in my bag.
Tuition was due on Monday, and I had been saving toward it for four years.
"Two announcements tonight," my father said, the Alpha's voice filling the room.
He smiled at the crowd.
"First, my younger daughter has been admitted to the Royal Warriors' College."
The hall clapped and howled.
My sister Sabine stood beside him in a silver dress, glowing a little the way she always did when people looked at her.
"Second," my father said. "The College is expensive, and this pack takes care of its own."
I felt my stomach go tight.
"My mother's bequest to the Brask grandchild will pay Sabine's first four years."
My grandmother's bequest was the money in my name.
It was the money I had counted every payday.
Nobody had asked me.
Every phone in the hall swung toward my face.
My mother came through the crowd with a cup in both hands and her soft, worried smile.
"Sweetheart, it's only a loan to the family," Hedda said. "Your sister's future is the pack's future."
"The fund is mine, Mom."
"And you'll have it back. Next year, I promise. Have I ever lied to you?"
She pushed the cup toward me.
It was the full-moon tonic, the one she handed me every month before I sat in the family circle.
"Drink this. You look pale, and the moon is coming."
I took it and did not drink it.
I had been pouring it down the garage drain for eight weeks.
"Alpha," I called, and my voice carried over the room. "The fund has my name on it."
My father didn't even turn his head all the way.
"You're a C-rank, Linnea. You'll be fixing trucks with or without a degree."
Someone near the buffet laughed.
"Sabine has a gift that could protect this pack," he said. "You have a wrench."
My sister looked at her shoes.
She didn't say a word.
I set the cup down on the nearest table.
My hands were shaking, but my voice wasn't.
"So I'll say this once, in front of everyone who's filming."
"You stole it from me, and you're proud of it."
"Sit down," my father said, and there was Alpha weight in it. The kind that makes a small wolf's knees fold.
My knees didn't fold.
For eight weeks I had been getting my own weight back, and tonight it was holding me up.
"I'm not sitting," I said. "I'm leaving. You don't get a say in my life from tonight."
"You can't leave. You're unmated and under twenty-five. You answer to me."
"Not anymore," said a stranger's voice from the doors.
A man in a black Royal Command coat stood in the doorway with a leather folder under his arm.
The hall's doors had swung wide behind him, and the night air came in.
Two hundred phones turned to him.
"Linnea Brask?" he said.
"That's me."
"I'm an envoy of the Royal Command. I'm here to deliver your countersigned contract, as the Crown requires."
My father laughed, short and rough. "There's a mistake. My daughter is C-rank."
The envoy opened the folder without hurrying.
"Six weeks ago Miss Brask took the open-gate test at the capital," he said. "The instruments recorded her at S."
The hall made a sound I had never heard a pack hall make.
"She signed the same afternoon," the envoy went on. "The Crown covers her tuition at any university she picks, and she belongs to the Fourth Hand under Commander Hollis Garrow."
"S-Rank?" my mother whispered.
The cup she had been holding slipped out of her fingers and broke on the floor.
My father took one step toward me with his hand open to take the folder.
The envoy closed it against his chest. "A pack can't void a Royal seal, Alpha Osric Brask."
I picked up my bag.
Nobody stopped me, and two hundred phones followed me all the way to the door.
I walked through the doors into the cold night.
Behind me the ward lamps along the hall's roof flickered and went dim, one after another.
Then I heard my sister cry out and drop to her knees on the floor.
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