The Alpha's Fine Print novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Back Page

I read the back page with a bearskin around my shoulders and a pair of reading glasses on my nose.

Bess stood with her back politely turned, facing the wall.

Lorcan sat beside me on the rug in a pair of jeans, shirtless, hair a mess.

The page was thin yellow paper, taped to the back of page four with brittle tape.

The handwriting was copperplate, from before the first war.

I read it twice, the way I read everything.

"What does it say?" Lorcan asked.

"It says what the front page doesn't," I said. "It's a second clause."

I read the line aloud, slowly.

"If the Alpha shall ask, and the Steward shall answer yes before the assembled blood under a full moon, then the refusal is the Steward's no longer, but the Luna's."

"And the seat is held by two, so long as both shall live."

Nobody breathed.

"It's a mating," Bess whispered.

"It's a contract," I said. "A marriage, effectively. A permanent one."

"You'd hold my no for life," Lorcan said, quietly.

"Not exactly. The Luna holds it, which means the seat is shared."

"Neither of us decides alone."

I took off the glasses.

"It says you have to ask, in front of everyone. And I have to answer."

"Under the next moon," said Bess. "In twenty-nine days."

"That's twenty-nine days to decide."

"It's twenty-nine days to be asked," Lorcan said.

His voice was very steady.

I looked at him.

He had sworn never to ask me for anything I hadn't asked for first.

I saw him decide, right then, to keep the promise even here.

"I won't ask you," he said. "Not unless you tell me to ask."

"Not a word. Not a look. You choose whether I ask, and when."

"Lorcan."

"It's your yes."

I stared at him, this man who had been obeyed his whole life and had spent a month learning to wait.

Bess cleared her throat.

"I'll be in the barn," she said, to the wall. "With my eggs. For a long time."

She fled.

The door banged.

The fire popped.

I folded the page along its old crease and set it in the folder, and the hall seemed to hum around us.

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