Seven Rejections Later My Second Chance Mate Is an Alpha King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Seventh Cut
At the Hunter's Moon Dane MacCarthy cuts Morven loose for the seventh time before two hundred wolves, and she walks out of the circle instead of begging; at the gate an unknown voice answers the empty bond.
Dane MacCarthy cut our bond for the seventh time in front of two hundred wolves.
Valerie Waldner stood by the fire and watched him do it.
It was the night of the full moon, and the whole pack had come to the stone circle.
That morning Dane had kissed my forehead and sworn this would be the last vow I ever needed.
He had said he would name me Luna tonight, in front of everyone.
He had also said Valerie had only come back for her things.
I had believed him, because I was tired and because it was easier.
Before dusk his mother had pinned my sash and pressed two fingers to my wrist, the way she did before every vow.
"Strong," she said, and kissed the scars there. "Good girl."
She had nursed me through six cut fevers.
She was the only person in that pack who had never once told me to be patient.
Now she stood at the foot of the Stone, and her hand shot out and caught her son's sleeve.
"Not tonight," she whispered. "Anything but seven."
Dane shook her off.
I thought she was being superstitious.
She kept a little notebook of every date, and she had always hated that number.
He climbed the Stone and didn't look at me.
"By the moon that heard me, I give back what she gave me."
The bite scar on my left shoulder went white-hot.
Something in my chest tore down the middle, and I heard myself make a sound.
Two hundred wolves watched me bend at the waist and breathe through it.
Nobody came forward.
Dane stepped down and stopped an arm's length from me.
"Don't make this a scene, Morven," he said, low. "Take it calmly. You know how it goes."
"Valerie needs me right now," he added. "Do you want her called a homewrecker in front of the whole pack?"
I looked at Valerie.
She had the grace to look at her boots.
They were new boots, and they were not the boots of a woman who had come back for her things.
"One week," Dane said. "Then I come to your door, and we do it again under the next moon."
Six times he had said that.
Six times I had said yes, because the fever does not wait for pride.
Cut fever burns a severed wolf for days, and it kills some of them.
Black Pine's elders had always said one thing ends it, and that is a re-bond.
So I had paid for six of Dane's mistakes with my own body, and then I had let him bite me again.
My seventh token hung at my neck, a pine cone no bigger than my thumb, carved by his own hand.
I took it off.
The cord caught on my braid, and I pulled until it came free.
I set it on the cold top of the Stone.
"That's seven," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt, and it carried.
"I won't be at your door."
Dane laughed, one short, surprised laugh.
"Morven. The fever."
"I know what the fever does."
An elder at the front stepped out of the crowd.
She had held my hand at the second cut and told me to be a good wolf.
"Girl, you'll be dead by the weekend. Say the word and it's over tonight."
"Then it kills me," I said. "I'm still not saying it."
Nobody in the circle spoke.
I had pictured this night for seven years, and in the picture I was always braver than I was now.
So I stepped out.
I walked down the path between the wolves, and they moved aside to let me go.
Tobin Ainsley came out of the dark at the edge of the trees and fell into step without a word.
He had driven me to the healer after my first cut, when I was nineteen and had opened my own wrists.
He took my elbow now and kept his mouth shut, which for Tobin was a kindness.
Hester MacCarthy caught up with us at the pack gate, out of breath, her cardigan buttoned wrong.
"Darling, wait. Wait one week. Come to my kitchen, I'll make the broth, we'll sit with it."
"I'm not going back, Hester."
"You say that every time."
"No," I said. "Every time, I said I'd think about it."
Her hand tightened on mine, and she looked past me at the Stone, and her lips moved.
"Then please, at least don't tell anyone it's finished. Not until the moon turns."
I did not understand why she cared about that, and I was too cold to ask.
The first wave of the fever hit me in the road.
It started behind my eyes and poured down my spine, and my knees went out from under me.
Tobin said my name from far away.
The gravel was coming up to meet me.
Then something answered in my chest, in the place Dane had torn open an hour ago.
It was not the bond I had lost.
It was a different one, older than the other, and it was warm.
A man's voice spoke inside my head, low and steady and nothing like Dane's.
"Morven. Don't fall. I've got you."
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