My Mate and Family's Choice novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Milk
Two hundred guests watch Tegan's mother carry a glass of milk to her minutes before the mating ceremony; she drinks it and wakes in a stranger's lodge with the Butcher of Elk Fork barring the door, breaks the window and runs, and finds one text from her mate and no one looking for her.
My mother crossed the whole length of Moon Rise Lodge carrying a glass of milk while two hundred wolves watched.
She wore the plum dress she had saved for this day.
She held the glass in both hands.
I was standing by the fire in my wedding gown, waiting for the horn that would start my mating ceremony.
"Drink this, Tegan," she said. "All of it."
"I'm not thirsty, Mama."
"You're as white as the dress. Dalton asked me to bring it himself."
She turned her phone toward me.
The text was from him. "Make her drink something warm. Her hands shook at the fitting. Love you both."
Across the hall, Dalton stood among the Henshaw elders in his black coat.
He caught my eye and touched two fingers to his chest.
I could smell him from forty feet away, cloves and warm cider, the way I always could, even in July.
I had been Dalton Henshaw's mate for four years.
My wolf had not said a word to me since the night he handed me a cup of spiced cider at the Gathering.
Everyone said white wolves were shy.
I had stopped asking her to speak.
My sister Junie pushed through the crowd and grabbed my hand.
She squeezed so hard my knuckles ground together, and then she let go and stepped back without a word.
"Junie," I said. "What?"
"Nothing," she said. Her eyes were wet. "You look beautiful."
I thought she was being dramatic.
My mother kissed my forehead and held her lips there a second too long.
"Whatever happens today," she whispered, "you are my brave girl."
The glass was cold in my hands.
The milk tasted of honey and something green underneath.
My mother watched me swallow, the way she used to watch me cross the creek ice when I was small.
By the third swallow the fire had started to slide sideways.
The floor tipped.
I felt her hand under my elbow, and I heard her say, loud enough for the whole hall, "Nerves. She's just nervous. Give her room."
People laughed kindly.
Dalton was still smiling at me from across the room.
Then everything went dark.
I woke on a cot, under a ceiling of black stone beams.
The air smelled of pine smoke and old leather.
I was still in my gown, and the hem was wet.
At the far end of the room a man stood with his back to me, lowering an iron bar across a heavy door.
The bar dropped into its brackets with a sound I felt in my teeth.
He was enormous, and he did not hurry.
He turned around.
There was a scar through his left eyebrow, and his eyes were the flat grey of river ice.
I knew that face from the Gathering, from across a bonfire, always looking somewhere else.
Rodrick MacAlister, Alpha of the MacAlister pack.
The Butcher of Elk Fork.
My father used his name to call us out of the woods at dusk.
"Where's Dalton?" I said. My tongue felt thick.
"Not here."
"Where is my mother?"
"At home, I'd think. She put you in my truck herself, at noon."
"No."
"Edwin Haskins signed at dawn," he said. "Annette put the pen in his hand."
"Signed what?"
"A debt. Nine years old." He did not look away. "I told her I'd cancel it if you came up this mountain. I didn't ask how."
I stared at him.
"So I'm the payment."
He took a moment to answer, and I hated that he took it.
"That's what the paper says."
I stood up too fast and caught the bedpost.
"Open the door."
"Not tonight. There are wolves on the ridge road, and they aren't mine."
"Open it."
"No."
There was an iron poker leaning against the stone hearth.
I picked it up.
He watched me do it and did not move.
So I put the poker through the window.
The glass went out in one long sheet.
"Mind the frame," Rodrick said behind me, quietly, as if I'd dropped a cup.
I climbed out over the sill and dropped into snow up to my shins.
He didn't follow.
I ran downhill in my wedding dress and my bare feet until the lodge was only a light through the trees.
Then I stopped, shaking, and put my hand in the skirt pocket.
My mother had sewn that pocket in herself, the week before, so I could carry my phone to the ceremony.
The screen lit my fingers blue.
Forty-one missed calls.
Thirty-nine from Junie, two from my father, and none from the man I was supposed to marry.
There was only one text from Dalton, sent an hour ago.
"Your mother says you ran. I'm not angry. Come home to me."
Behind me the lodge door stayed barred, and nobody was coming up the mountain to look for me.
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