Substitute Luna, Runaway With His Quadruplets novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Sixth Refusal
At the Harvest Moon gathering the Beta reads out a blood test that says Nora is not his daughter, and Rhys speaks his sixth refusal; she walks out and finds four heartbeats on a scan.
The Beta read the blood test out loud in front of the whole pack.
"Nora Thorne is not my daughter."
Two hundred wolves stood under the chandeliers of the Moon Hall, and not one of them made a sound.
I stood at the head table in the Luna's silver band, holding a glass of water I hadn't touched.
The Beta had raised me for twenty-six years.
He didn't look at me when he said it.
"My real daughter came home to us last week," he said. "Priscilla, come here, girl."
She stepped out from the crowd in a plain grey dress, blonde hair pinned back, and took his hand.
An hour earlier she had sat beside me in the kitchen, holding a mug of ginger tea against my wrist.
"You've been green since breakfast," she'd said. "Drink it slow. Give me your phone, I'll put my number in, in case you need anything tonight."
She had typed it in, set the phone down, and photographed the clinic card lying next to it.
"Just so I remember your appointment," she'd said, smiling.
I had thanked her.
Now my brother Gideon stood behind her with his arms crossed.
"Fraud," he said, loud enough for the back rows. "Twenty-six years she ate at our table. She married an Alpha on a Thorne name that was never hers."
Someone near the doors hissed.
Someone else said, "Wolfless and a liar."
My hands had gone cold, the way they do when I'm upset.
I set the glass on the window ledge beside me and my palm slid across the pane.
A thin white frost spread out from under my fingers.
It had done that since I was a child.
I'd never told anyone. I figured it was the old glass.
I took my hand away.
Rhys had not moved from his chair.
My husband sat very straight, his green eyes on the tablecloth, the scar through his right eyebrow pulled tight.
For two years I had counted every full moon.
Six times he had come to my door when the pull took us both.
Six times, at dawn, he had said the words.
Five of them had been said in private.
"Rhys," I said.
He looked up.
"Is this what you want?"
"The pack needs a Luna with a true name," he said. "And a wolf."
"That isn't what I asked."
The elders along the wall shifted. One of them, an old man in a brown vest, cleared his throat.
"Alpha, the law says the sixth must be spoken before witnesses."
Rhys stood.
He put his hand flat on the table and the whole hall turned to him.
"I, Rhys Calloway, Alpha of Silver Claw, refuse you, Nora Thorne, as my mate. For the sixth time, before this pack."
I felt it go.
It wasn't a sound. It was a line in my chest, pulled tight since the wedding, and it snapped.
My knees almost went.
Priscilla's hand tightened on the Beta's, and her eyes were wet.
"I'm so sorry, Nora," she whispered. "I never wanted this to happen like this."
She sounded like she meant it.
I looked at the Luna's band on my wrist.
Two years I had worn it to funerals, naming days and every pack meal. I'd learned the name of every child in this room.
I thought of the sick feeling that had been following me since the last full moon.
The vomiting. The tiredness. A cycle I hadn't thought about because Rhys had never once stayed to see me count it.
I thought: If I tell him here, he'll say I'm lying to keep my seat.
So I didn't tell him.
I unclasped the band and set it on the table in front of him.
It rang once on the wood.
"Keep it warm for her," I said.
No one laughed.
I walked down the length of the hall with two hundred people watching and I didn't look at one of them.
At the door I kept my back straight, took my coat from the hook, and stepped out into the cold.
I stepped out.
That was all I did, and it was enough.
It was nine miles to Haldane. I walked the first three, until Maud's pickup came crawling up the road behind me with its lights off and the passenger door already open.
"Get in," said my grandmother, the Beta's mother, who had never once made me feel like a visitor.
She had a thermos of broth on the seat.
I got as far as the cottage before I threw it up in her sink.
Joanna Pike came at midnight with a portable scanner under her arm and a stethoscope hanging out of her parka.
She had known me since seventh grade and she didn't ask questions.
She just rolled up my shirt, spread the cold gel and tilted the screen toward the lamp.
She went quiet.
Then she went quieter.
"Nora," she said. "Don't move."
On the screen were four small bright flickers, side by side, each one beating.
"One. Two. Three." Her finger stopped. "Four."
I put my cold hand over my mouth.
Four heartbeats.
And the man who had just refused me for the last time had no idea.
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