My Mate Was Buried at Christmas, So His Three Brothers Claimed Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Claim
At the Christmas table the alpha hands the widow to her mate's three brothers, so she takes a lantern, kisses the youngest in front of the pack and tells all three to get their coats.
Armand stood at the head of the Christmas table and told sixty people he was giving me away.
I had buried my husband seven days before.
My husband's chair sat empty in the middle of the long table, and nobody had dared to fill it.
Armand's voice made grown wolves lower their eyes.
"By the Winter Claim," Armand said, "the widow goes to her mate's brothers until the thaw."
The pack house was warm with roast pork and woodsmoke.
Outside the windows, snow was falling on the frozen lake and the black pines beyond it.
"The pack gives its blessing. She will want for nothing. Her mate's brothers will see to that."
Wolves hold one bond in their whole lives.
Mine lay in the ground on the ridge.
The old rule said it would keep its hold on me for a year and a day.
I put my hand to the back of my neck, where my mate's bite had healed into a pale ridge six years ago.
It had ached for seven days.
"And if there is no pup in her by the thaw," Armand said, "she comes back to this house and into my keeping."
A fork rang against a plate and went quiet.
Nobody looked at me.
Sixty people I had taught to read, whose books I kept, whose babies I had held, and every one of them studied the roast.
Beside me, in her wheelchair, Memere cleared her throat.
She was ninety-one, Armand's mother, and she kept the old words of the pack in her head.
She said it loud enough for the near end of the table to hear.
"The voice never worked on a man who was guarding his mate. Etienne used to say so."
"Maman," Armand said.
That was all he said, and she shut her mouth.
I looked down the table at the three men he meant.
The eldest, a game warden with gray coming into his beard, had gone the color of the tablecloth.
The middle one, who laughed at every funeral and every wedding, was staring at the candle in front of him.
The youngest had put down his fork and laced his fingers together so hard that his knuckles showed.
None of them wanted this.
I saw it as plainly as I saw the roast.
They would do it anyway, because their father had stood up and said it.
I would be passed down the table from hand to hand.
For six years those three had left every room I walked into.
Now they were to take me home.
The Claim is old, older than the pack house.
A widow does not spend her first winter alone.
Her mate's brothers keep her through the white season, the two cold weeks when every wolf in the pack goes wild with wanting.
I had watched other widows go to other cabins with their eyes on the floor.
Some of them came back thin and quiet, and none of them ever said what the winter had been.
I was twenty-eight, I kept the pack's books, and I had never once been handed anywhere.
I pushed my chair back.
The scrape of it across the floorboards turned sixty heads at last.
I picked up the hurricane lantern from the end of the table and lit it from the candle.
"I'll walk to the cabin myself," I said. "No one will carry me, and no one will give me."
Armand's face did not change.
"Mireille. Sit down."
I did not sit.
I walked around the table to the youngest brother's chair.
He looked up at me through his glasses, and he did not breathe.
I bent, took his jaw in my free hand, and kissed Hugo on the mouth in front of his father and the whole pack.
He tasted of red wine and woodsmoke.
For one heartbeat he stayed frozen.
Then his hand came up and slid into my hair, and he kissed me back, softly.
He made a small sound in his throat that I felt in my knees.
When I straightened, the room had gone so quiet that I could hear the stove tick.
I looked at all three of them.
"Tonight I'm choosing," I said. "Get your coats."
The eldest, Remy, stood up so fast that his chair went over behind him.
His eyes were wet, and his jaw was working.
"Mireille," he said. "We would never."
"I know," I said. "That's why."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend