My Mate Bet Me Away, So the Lycan King Collected novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Banner
Orla lands in Denver to a pack chat full of her ugliest photo and her mate's IOU, walks into the Silver Creek hall with her face bare, takes the bet money, rejects Brock, and the Lycan King walks in to collect his prize.
Last night my mate put me on a poker table and lost me to the Lycan King.
I found out when my plane touched down in Denver.
My phone buzzed in my hand until it was hot.
Dozens of messages from our pack chat, the private one every wolf in our territory lives on.
A red banner sat pinned at the top: CONGRATULATIONS TO THE LYCAN KING ON HIS NEW PRIZE.
Under it was a photo of a torn napkin with an IOU scrawled across it in Brock's loopy handwriting.
His signature sat at the bottom, with the Blood Moon stamp beside it.
Below that was a second post, from my best friend's account.
It was my ugliest photo.
I was asleep on the pack bus with my mouth open and my hair stuck to my cheek.
The caption said: Our Luna, ladies and gentlemen. Hide your kids.
Two hundred and eleven wolves had laughed at it.
Then I saw the last message, from Brock himself.
Welcome home, Luna! Thirty grand says she's too shy to show her face in Silver Creek for a month. Who's in?
Forty wolves were in.
I stood in the aisle of the plane with my carry-on in my fist while people squeezed past me.
I had been away three years.
I had flown home because my grandmother Hazel asked me to come, and she never asks for anything.
I put the phone in my pocket and walked off the plane.
Kendra was waiting at arrivals with two coffees.
She was my best friend since we were eight, and she was crying before I reached her.
"Orla, I'm so sorry," she said. "I tried to stop him. He took my phone."
"That photo went out from your account, Kendra."
"He made me unlock it." She pushed a coffee into my hand. "Please don't go to the hall. Come to my place. Hide for a few days."
She was wearing Brock's pack hoodie, with the sleeves pushed up.
I noticed it, and I did not think about it.
"No," I said. "Drive me to the hall."
"Orla."
"Drive me, or I'll take a cab."
She drove.
On the way, I opened the camera and looked at my own face.
My eyes were red from the flight and my hair was a mess.
I did not fix any of it.
Silver Creek's hall sat at the end of a gravel road under the pines, and the lot was full.
It was Sunday lunch.
The whole pack was inside, and every one of them had my photo on their phones.
I walked through the double doors with my bag over my shoulder.
The noise died in pieces, table by table.
Brock stood at the head of the room with a beer in his hand and his boots on a chair.
He was twenty-nine, an Alpha, and handsome enough that the pack forgave him everything.
He had put his hand on my shoulder at the ceremony eight years ago and called me his.
I had cried that day, and the pack had laughed at that too.
"Orla!" he said. He grinned and spread his arms. "You made it. Did you see the chat?"
Nobody said a word.
"I saw it," I said.
"And you came anyway." He looked around the room. "I told you she would. Somebody pay me."
Nobody moved.
I walked to the long table by the kitchen, where the betting envelope sat next to the salt.
Kendra had told me about it in the car, in a small voice.
Thirty thousand dollars in cash, held for the bet.
I picked it up and tucked it into my bag.
"Hey," Brock said.
"You bet I'd be too shy to show my face," I said. "Here's my face."
I turned in a slow circle so the whole hall could see it.
"I won."
A wolf in the back snorted.
Somebody else started to laugh, and then stopped, because I was not laughing.
Brock put his beer down.
"That money's the pack's," he said.
"The forty wolves who put in lost the bet. Ask them for their money back."
I looked at the table by the window, and every wolf there looked at their plates.
Then I looked at Brock.
"You signed me away on a napkin," I said. "Under Moon law that's your hand and your word."
"It was a joke."
"Then say so to the Lycan King."
His grin slipped.
I touched my left shoulder, where my mate mark sat under my sleeve.
It was cold, like it had always been when he was near.
I had told myself for eight years that this was how marks felt.
"Brock Hunnewell," I said, loud enough for the back wall. "I reject you as my mate, and I take back my name."
Nothing hurt.
That was the strange part.
A rejection is supposed to tear through the chest and drop a wolf to her knees.
I stood in front of two hundred wolves and felt nothing at all, except tired.
Brock's wolf did not even stir behind his eyes.
"You can't," Brock said.
"I just did."
"Orla." Kendra had come in behind me, and her voice was thin. "Please. Stop."
I opened my mouth to answer her.
The double doors opened behind us without a sound.
A cold draft came down the hall and the candles on the long tables bent flat.
Every wolf in the room dropped their eyes, one table after another, all the way to the back.
I turned around.
He was the tallest man I had ever seen, in a black coat with snow on the shoulders, though it had not snowed in Denver.
He had dark hair, grey eyes and a hard jaw, and no wolf in the room dared meet his eyes.
His eyes went over the hall once and landed on me, and his nostrils flared.
Lucan Kruse, the Lycan King, took one step inside.
"Orla Ardmore," he said, slow and low. "You're coming with me."
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