My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: In Full Settlement
At the Harvest Reckoning Verna reads the sum aloud and sells Caly to the Alpha who hates her father's name; Caly strikes out three words with the Teller's pen, writes her own terms and walks to his truck on her own feet.
My stepmother read out the price of me in a tin-roofed arbor on top of the mountain, and she never once looked up from the paper.
"Three hundred and ten thousand dollars," Verna said. "The Laurel Gap land. And the Alpha's daughter, to the Alpha's hearth, in full settlement."
Her voice had been made for reading aloud in church.
It rang off the roof and came back down on us.
I was the Alpha's daughter.
My father had been dead two years, and nobody had asked me about any of this.
I had learned it four hours ago, from a text.
It came in while I was kneeling in front of a hive with a smoker going and propolis stuck to both thumbs.
I was still in my hospice scrubs under my father's barn coat.
I had a dying man's bed to change at six the next morning.
I had come up the mountain because the text said my name was on the note.
My own pack stood on the left side of the fire pit in the cold, forty-odd people in work clothes with their hands in their pockets.
The Sorrow Knob pack stood on the right.
There were three hundred of them, and they were fed and warm, and they were not looking at us as neighbors.
Between the two sides stood the Teller's table, and on it lay the note under a lantern.
My stepbrother Dell stood behind Verna with his red eyes on his boots.
He had not looked at me since I walked in.
"Dell," I said.
He made a small noise and turned his face toward the fire.
I knew that noise.
It was the noise he made when he owed somebody money.
"The sum is read," said the old woman at the Teller's table.
She was tiny and bent, in a man's wool cardigan, with a white braid wound on top of her head.
She kept both hands folded over a cloth bag in her lap.
"Does the buyer stand to it?"
The crowd on the right moved.
A man came across the gap between the two packs.
He was the biggest man in the arbor, six and a half feet of canvas coat and black hair, with a long scar through his left eyebrow.
His eyes were the pale cold blue of creek ice.
Everyone on that ridge knew him.
Ned McCracken, Alpha of the Sorrow Knob pack, who had never once been seen laughing in public.
He came straight at me.
I did not step back.
He stopped an arm's length away and drew one slow breath through his nose.
I felt it go through me.
Heat ran down my arms and pooled in my palms, and my wolf, whom I had not asked, lifted her head.
The ridge had a word for what that breath meant.
Somebody behind me on my own side said it softly, and it ran down the benches.
*Mate.*
I watched his face.
It went flat, and hard, and shut.
He did not look at me again.
He turned to the Teller's table and spoke so that the whole arbor could hear him.
"I'll take the land. I'll take the Lowry girl."
He let it sit.
"Understand that I take her the way I take a debt."
A murmur went along the McCracken benches.
Verna smiled.
She laid one hand over the gold cross at her throat.
"Your father's guilt was always going to cost something," she told me, gently, as if she were doing me a kindness. "I'm glad it's finally being paid."
I did not know what she meant.
It was the second time in my life she had said it, and the first time in front of a crowd.
I looked at the old Teller.
She was looking at her cloth bag.
She had not raised her eyes when Verna said *Lowry*, and she did not raise them for me.
Her knuckles stood out white on the cloth.
For two years I had washed strangers in the last week of their lives.
I had held their hands while they told me things they had never told their wives.
Nobody in all that time had asked what I wanted for myself, and I had stopped expecting it.
I walked to the Teller's table.
Nobody stopped me.
A blue ballpoint lay beside the note, chewed at one end.
I picked it up.
The words were typed: *in full settlement.*
I drew a line through them hard enough to dent the paper.
Above the line I wrote in my plain nurse's hand, the one I used for medication logs.
*One. Caly Lowry goes of her own feet.*
*Two. She owes the McCracken pack nothing.*
*Three. She keeps her bees and her route.*
*Four. Nobody enters her room unasked.*
*Five. She leaves when she likes.*
I set the pen down.
Then I picked it up again and held it out across the gap, toward the man who had bought me.
"Sign under it," I said. "Or don't. But you'll have read it."
The whole arbor had gone quiet.
Ned McCracken looked at the pen.
He did not look at my face.
His hand came up, big and scarred, with the knuckles split from some old fight, and stopped in the air between us.
I laid the pen across his open palm.
My knuckle brushed the hot skin.
Neither of us moved.
His fingers did not close, and he did not take his hand away.
I could feel the heat of him through the plastic.
I could feel something else down the length of my spine, and I knew exactly what it was, and I refused it.
"Then we're agreed," I said, "that you can't make me stay."
Nobody answered.
I turned my back on him.
I walked down the middle of the arbor with three hundred wolves watching and my stepbrother's red eyes on the ground.
I did not look at Verna.
My father's barn coat hung to my knees, and the cold came in at the collar.
I walked out past the benches and the fire pit to the grey Ford at the end of the row of trucks.
I knew it by the smell of apples and chainsaw oil.
I opened the passenger door myself, and I got in.
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