One Minute Younger Always Second Best Until I Walked Out the Door novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Naming
On her twin's Naming night Roxana sees him named Alpha for being born sixty seconds first, puts down her armband and walks out, where a rival Alpha waits with her map.
My father held up my map in front of two hundred wolves and called it my brother's plan.
It was the northern border map, the one that took me eleven nights.
Every ridge line was in my pencil.
Every ford was in my lettering.
It stood on an easel beside the birthday cake, and nobody looked at the corner where I had signed it.
"My son read this valley like no Alpha before him," my father said.
His voice was thin, because the lung sickness had taken most of it that winter.
"He drew the lines that keep our children safe. Tonight I give him the pack."
The hall roared.
My brother stood on the dais in the grey ceremonial jacket and let them.
We turned twenty-six that morning, and he was born sixty seconds before me.
For twenty-six years that minute has decided everything.
He got the heir's bedroom.
He got the first name on the ranking board.
I took first in the autumn trials, the winter run and the river race.
The board put me second each time, because the heir is listed first.
"Heir's courtesy," my father always said.
I went on drawing the maps.
Cassia touched my elbow.
She is my brother's fiancee, and she is the kind of woman who carries your coat without being asked.
"You look tired," she said. "Give me the tubes. I'll keep them safe tonight."
She was already smiling and already reaching for the leather case on my shoulder.
"I only want to hold them," she said. "Nothing here changes, Roxana. You know that."
I kept the case.
She patted my arm and went back to my brother's side.
The cake came out then, white, with a wolf in blue icing.
Colt cut the first slice.
He does it every year, and he has done it since we were sixteen.
He put the slice on my plate, and he did not touch his own until I took a bite.
I ate, and I did not taste it.
The pack lined up to shake his hand.
Orrin Lattimore, our Beta, gripped his shoulder and would not look at me.
Then Colt crossed the hall to my table with half the room watching.
"Roxy." He kept his voice low and warm. "Dad wants you to kneel after the toast."
"You want me to swear to you."
"First oath, right behind Orrin. It shows the pack we're one house. You'd be my second."
"And the maps?"
"You'd still draw them. Nothing changes."
Cassia had said the same words ten minutes earlier.
They had practised.
"You told them it was your plan," I said.
"It was our plan."
"You can't read a contour line, Colt."
His jaw tightened, and he glanced over his shoulder to see who had heard.
"Not here," he said. "Kneel, and we'll talk about everything at home."
I looked at the easel.
I looked at my father, small in his chair with the silver cord of the Alpha still around his neck.
Hiram Radley was watching me, and he did not ask me for anything.
He only waited for me to kneel.
I knew I was a heartbeat away from doing it.
I have done it every time.
So I set the leather case on the table.
I unbuckled the silver armband that marks a Radley, and I laid it on top of the case.
"What are you doing?" Colt said.
"Ranking myself first."
I walked to the middle of the floor, and the music stopped.
"I drew the border you just praised," I said. "I drew the ford, the ridge and the patrol grid."
Nobody spoke.
Somewhere a fork hit a plate.
"My brother is your Alpha tonight," I said. "I am not his second."
My father stood up with both hands on the chair.
"Roxana. If you walk out that door, you walk out without the Radley name."
"Then keep it," I said. "You've kept everything else."
I pushed through the doors into the cold.
The lot was full of pack trucks, and the gravel was loud under my heels.
I had a party dress and a set of house keys, and nowhere to go.
At the far end of the row stood a black pickup with a Black Creek plate.
A tall man leaned on the tailgate with his hands in the pockets of a canvas coat.
I knew his face from the border.
He was Jonas Whitlow, Alpha of the pack to the north, and he had stopped coming to our trading days three years ago.
Nobody had ever told me why.
"Miss Radley," he said. "I've been waiting an hour."
He took a folded paper from his coat and held it out.
It was a grid map of the Gravel Fork ridge, in my pencil, with a red circle around one ford.
"Your brother used this to kill mine," he said.
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