Sold to the Alpha novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Debt Table
Thyra writes the terms of her own sale at a Dunmere card table, and the Alpha who takes her father's note goes rigid at her scent and swears he does not know her.
My father put me on the card table.
He did it with one hand, and he smiled while he did it.
"She cooks," said Odd Lorne. "She scrubs. She's never once been sick."
The back room of the Gilded Ladle in Dunmere went quiet.
A dozen men sat around that table, and every one of them had heard me called worse things by my own father.
None of them had heard it done in front of a wolf.
The man across from Odd was not from Dunmere.
I knew it before I saw his face, because the room had made space around him.
He sat with his black coat open and his long hands flat on the felt.
The sides of his head were shaved close, with a topknot of dark hair on top, and a scar split his left eyebrow in two.
His eyes were amber in the lamplight.
Northern wolf eyes.
A silver pile of my father's markers sat in front of him, six hundred marks' worth.
"Alpha Rask," said the card-house keeper, softly, as if the name might bite him.
"The debt is lawful. Odd Lorne is good for it, or his property is."
My father spread his hands.
"I've nothing else," he said. "She's all I have, and she's worth the whole six hundred."
I was holding a tray of empty beer mugs.
I put it down on the nearest chair, very carefully, so my hands would have something to do.
"Property," I said.
"Thyra, love," said my father. "Be sensible."
"I have been sensible for twenty-two years, Da."
"Then keep at it," he said.
I walked to the table.
Nobody stopped me, because nobody thought I would do anything.
I took the pen from the keeper's inkstand, pulled the note out from under the Alpha's hand, and turned it over.
The back was blank.
"I'll go," I said. "I'll work it off. But I'll write it myself."
The Alpha did not move.
Something low in my belly pulled tight.
I ignored it, and I wrote.
I wrote that I would serve in the kitchens of Brenmoor Hold until six hundred silver marks were worked off.
I wrote that my wage would be set down in a ledger and I would hold a copy.
I wrote that I might buy myself out at any time for what was left.
Then I wrote the last two lines, and I said them aloud as I wrote.
"This bond covers kitchen labor and nothing else."
"My body is not part of the price."
The keeper coughed.
My father laughed, thin and nervous.
"She's a joker," he said.
I turned the paper around and pushed it across the felt to the wolf.
"Read it," I said.
He read it.
He read it twice, in fact, and his jaw worked on the second pass.
Then he lifted his face.
I have thought about that moment more often than I like.
His nostrils flared.
His whole body went still.
The rope in my belly yanked so hard I put a hand on the table to stay up.
I felt a second heartbeat knocking against my own ribs.
It was slower than mine and much heavier.
His amber eyes found mine and went wide, just for a moment.
Then they went flat and black as a shut window.
"I'll sign," said Alpha Ketil Rask.
He signed with a hand that was not entirely steady.
My father clapped his hands once, delighted, and patted his empty pockets.
"Your debt is paid in full," said the Alpha, in a voice like cold iron.
"Take your coat and go home, Lorne. You are not welcome in my sight."
My father left, still smiling.
He did not look back at me once.
I stood there with the pen in my hand and a stranger's pulse beating in my chest.
"My lord," I said. "The terms are signed. What happens now?"
"Now you walk to the north gate with my wagon."
"And when we get there?"
He looked at me for a very long breath.
"Put her in the scullery," he said to the man at his shoulder.
"The lowest post they have."
Then, to no one: "I don't know her."
It was said so quietly that no one else in the room could hear what lay under it.
But I could, plainly, in the thud of the heart that was not mine.
He was lying, and it was costing him.
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