My Alpha Wanted a Graceful Rejection, So I Rehearsed Dating His Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Item Fourteen
Nils hands Aino a laminated script for her own rejection and expects her to wait a year, so she agrees to rehearse, adds the whole consequence including leaving the pack, and hands him a list of 41 gifts to start returning at six.
My mate gave me a laminated card with a hole punched in one corner, so I could keep my own rejection on a key ring.
"It's only three lines," Nils said.
We were in the Alpha's office at the Pine Lake lodge, eighteen days before the Midsummer feast.
I still had rye flour up to both elbows.
Nils Hakala would be anointed Alpha of a hundred and ninety wolves on that Saturday.
His mother stood behind his chair with a three-inch binder hugged to her chest.
The binder had a red tab that said ITEM 14.
The card said: "I hear the Alpha. I release the bond. I wish the pack well."
Under that, in smaller type, it said: Do not cry. Do not throw the loaf.
"Explain it to me again," I said.
"The Council wants an Alpha who chooses his Luna," Nils said.
"A fated mate isn't a choice. So at the feast I reject you in front of everybody, and it shows I chose."
"Chose what?" I said.
"To reject you."
"That's the choosing," I said.
"It's about optics, Loaf."
I had been his fated mate for eight years.
Since I was nineteen, a pull behind my breastbone had pointed at him wherever he was.
It pointed at him now across a desk, while he told me where to put my hands.
I wanted to throw the stapler.
I wanted to cry into a sack of flour.
I did neither, because I had never done either in public without practicing first.
"Obviously we'll talk again after," Nils said. "In a year. Eighteen months, once the Council settles."
"Talk," I said.
"Pick things back up," he said.
He smiled at me, the smile he used on contractors.
"You'll stay in your cabin, people will be kind, and then we'll see."
"Okay," I said.
Nils's smile got wider.
"Great," he said. "Say those on the day and we're done."
"I don't say anything in front of a hundred and ninety wolves until I've said it three times in private."
"It's three lines, Aino," Nils said.
"Then it's three runs. Start now."
Nils stood up.
"Aino Laitinen," he said, in the voice he had been saving for the feast.
"I break this loaf, sorry, and I break the bond. You are released."
"Sorry," Ulla said.
"It's polite," Nils said.
"The Alpha does not apologize in the Words," Ulla said. "It is not in the Words."
She drew a line through something in the binder.
"Again," I said.
He did it again without the sorry.
I read my three lines off the card, and that was the first run.
"Second run has the loaf," I said. "The Words say the Alpha breaks it with his hands."
I went through the connecting door to the bakehouse and came back with yesterday's rye, the one I'd been saving for the ducks.
It was dark and round and the weight of a bowling ball.
Nils took it in both hands and pulled.
Nothing happened.
Then he raised it over his head and brought it down on the corner of his desk.
The stapler jumped.
A framed photograph of his father in Florida fell on its face.
The loaf had a small dent in it, and the desk had a bigger one.
Ulla wrote something in the binder.
I assumed it was the desk.
"On Saturday it'll be this morning's bake," I said. "That breaks easier. Not that easy."
"You're enjoying this," Nils said, rubbing the heel of his palm.
"I'm preparing."
"Is there a third run?" Nils asked.
"There's an audience."
I opened the connecting door again.
The four people who work my ovens stood in a row with their trays.
At six that morning I had asked them to gasp on my nod.
Nils said the Words.
I read my lines.
I nodded.
They gasped.
One of them added, "Oh no," in a flat, pleasant voice.
"Why are they here?" Nils said.
"On Saturday there'll be a hundred and ninety. Four is a start."
"Now the rest of it," I said.
"What rest of it?"
"A rejection isn't three lines. It's what happens after. I'm not staying in my cabin to be kind to. I'm leaving the pack."
Ulla's pen stopped.
"Leaving where?" Nils said.
"Out the gate. You break the loaf, I eat my half, and the pack howls me out. That's the Parting Howl, so we rehearse that."
"Aino," Nils said.
"I'll return everything you ever gave me, so we rehearse that," I said.
"And the Courtesy Hour is open to any unmated Alpha in the hall, so we rehearse whoever comes."
"Nobody's coming," Nils said. "Halme's the only unmated Alpha who'll be there."
"He's the Blessing Alpha, and a statue with a beard. He'd rather be audited."
"Then we rehearse him not coming," I said.
Two years ago at the Moot ball I had crossed the floor to Soren Halme after thirty rehearsals of the waltz.
He set his cup on a windowsill and walked out the side door.
I tore the top sheet off my clipboard and put it on his blotter.
It had forty-one lines, in order, in my best handwriting.
Nils read the first one.
Then he read it again.
"Eighteen-foot cedar canoe," he said. "That was an anniversary."
"It's an easy one. Dock, six o'clock."
"Loaf. Where am I supposed to put a canoe?"
"That," I said, "is a question for the person who bought it."
Ulla uncapped her pen and wrote the canoe into the binder.
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