Sentenced to Two Wardens, I Served My Whole Term in Their Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bite
At the Mating Rite Linnea bites the alpha's nephew through the shoulder, accepts a year at the north Watchhouse under two Wardens sworn not to touch her, and puts her hand on Anders's chest.
I bit Torben Strommen through the shoulder before the alpha could say the first word of the mating rite.
He went down on his knees on the hall floor with his hand clamped over the wound.
Three hundred wolves went silent.
Blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto the maple boards.
I stood over him with his taste in my mouth and did not wipe it off.
"You're mine by Christmas, Linnea," Torben said. "You'll learn to like it."
He was twenty-nine, the alpha's nephew, and in August the pack had decided that I belonged to him.
Nobody asked me.
My father put my name on the Rite list at our kitchen table and told me a Tvedt did not refuse the alpha's blood.
I told him no twice.
So tonight I gave the pack my answer in the one way the Rite cannot argue with.
Three judges sat at the long table under the flag.
The eldest was a woman of seventy who had judged every bite in this pack for thirty years.
"Linnea Tvedt," she said. "Do you know what a bite on Mating Night earns?"
"A year at the north Watchhouse," I said.
"Under the two Wardens of the boundary."
"Yes, ma'am."
"They are sworn by this sentence not to lay a hand on you," the judge said.
"They are the only two men in this pack I would trust with a woman alone."
Somebody near the back door laughed, short and loud.
I looked.
Mikkel Roen was leaning on the wall with his arms folded and his head thrown back, grinning at the rafters.
Beside him stood Anders Fjeld, six and a half feet of beard and canvas coat, with his eyes closed.
"Mr. Roen," the judge said. "You will be silent."
"Yes, ma'am," Mikkel said, and laughed again.
The alpha stood up from his chair.
He was sixty and gray and he did not look at me. He looked at his nephew bleeding on the floor.
"A bite on my blood is a bite on the pack," he said. "A year is generous."
Two of Torben's cousins got him up by the arms.
He kept his eyes on me the whole way to the door, and what was in them was not pain.
"Do you accept the sentence?" the judge asked me.
I had known what the answer was since August.
I had known which two men held the north post this year, because I had asked, and I had known what the bite would earn.
"I accept," I said.
Nobody in the hall moved.
I walked to the coat rack by the door, where I had hung my bag before the Rite began.
It held my boots, my beekeeper's veil, a week of clothes and my grandmother's quilt.
I had packed it the night before.
The old women of the pack looked at the bag and then at me.
One of them, a very small one in a green cardigan, nodded once.
Nobody stopped me.
The crowd opened down the middle of the hall.
Three hundred people stepped back from a woman who had bitten the alpha's blood and accepted her sentence.
At the end of the opening stood the two Wardens.
Anders opened his eyes when I got close. They were gray and tired and they did not leave my face.
"Linnea," he said.
It was the first time he had said my name in six years.
"Warden," I said.
Mikkel pushed off the wall, still smiling. "I'll take your bag."
"I've got it."
"I know," he said. "I'd like to carry it anyway."
I gave it to him.
Outside, the rain came down so hard the parking lot was running with it.
Anders's truck was an old green Ford with a plank bed and a cracked dash. He opened the passenger door for me and held it.
I did not get in.
I stood in the rain with my hair coming loose and looked at the two of them under the one security light.
"A year is a long time," I said.
"It is," Anders said.
"You two are the ones who have to keep your hands off me."
Mikkel put my bag in the truck bed and turned around slowly. The grin was still there, but it had gone careful.
"That's what the sentence says," he said.
"It does," I said. "Nobody said the sentence forbids me touching you."
Anders did not move.
I stepped up to him until my boots were between his boots.
I laid my palm flat against his chest, over his heart, on the wet canvas.
It was going hard.
Behind me, Mikkel, who had not stopped smiling all night, stopped.
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