The Alpha's Slave-Born Daughter Made Kings Kneel novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Chopping Block
Linnea cracked her cousin's skull for using her mother as a target, and her uncle wants her right hand on the block while her Alpha father looks at the ceiling; she walks to the block herself, and the High King's horn sounds.
This morning my cousin threw knives at my mother in the yard, so I hit her once and her skull cracked on the wall.
By afternoon the whole pack stood in the Great Hall to watch what it cost me.
A guard held each of my arms.
The iron cuffs on my wrists pulled my hands toward the floor, as they had every day for twenty years.
My uncle stood beside a chopping block the guards had dragged in from the kitchen yard.
"Pack law is hard on all of us," he said, almost kindly. "The hand that struck blood is forfeit."
Behind him my cousin sat on a bench with a red cloth pressed to her head, crying where everyone could see.
Nobody had cried for my mother.
She stood by the kitchen door with her wrists tied and three cuts through her sleeve, and she kept her face to the wall.
She had not made a sound in the yard, either.
She never did.
Every night she pressed her thumbs on the inside of my cuffs and hummed three low notes, and afterward the iron was never cold.
I had never asked her why.
My father sat in the Alpha's chair above all of us.
Edric Storrow, Alpha of Greyhollow.
He had not looked at me since the day I was five, when he had the smith hammer these cuffs shut on me.
He was looking at the roof beams now.
My mother Ilse was a thrall, a wolfless captive taken in a raid and kept as a slave.
That made me the Alpha's blood and nobody's daughter.
"Father," I said. "She threw knives at Mama until she bled."
"No one told you to speak," my uncle Osric said.
My half-sister Sunniva came down from beside the Alpha's chair in her cream gown, with her honey hair pinned up and her face full of sorrow.
Everyone in Greyhollow loved Sunniva.
"Linnea, please," she said, soft enough that only the front rows heard. "Kneel. Let Father be merciful."
"I won't kneel for a hand I haven't lost."
She sighed, and her boot slammed into the back of my knee.
I hit the stone on both knees, and the guards pushed down on my shoulders.
"Kneel," Sunniva said again, louder this time, for the pack.
My knees stung against the floor.
Some of the pack laughed.
A girl in the third row covered her mouth, and her mother pulled her hand down and told her to watch.
Osric nodded to the man by the block, who lifted an axe with a blade as wide as my face.
"Right hand," Osric said. "Today. Before supper."
My cousin stopped crying and smiled behind her cloth.
I looked at my father.
His eyes stayed on the roof beams.
I looked at my mother, and for one moment she turned her head and looked straight at me.
She shook it once. No.
She wanted me to kneel and take it quietly, like her.
I had done that for twenty years.
So I stood up.
I shrugged both guards off my shoulders, and the one on my left stumbled back into the wall.
The Hall went quiet.
None of them knew the iron weakened me.
None of them knew how much was left.
"Linnea," Sunniva said, and for the first time she sounded unsure.
I walked to the block on my own.
Every wolf in the Hall moved aside for me, because they did not know what else to do.
I laid my right hand flat on the wood, with the cuff clanking against it.
"Take it," I said. "Then my mother walks out of this Hall with her hands untied and nobody touches her again."
Osric looked up at the Alpha.
My father said nothing.
That was his answer, and it was the only one he had ever given me.
"Do it," Osric told the axeman.
The axe went up.
I did not close my eyes.
A horn sounded outside the great doors, three long notes that shook dust from the beams.
The axe stopped at the top of its swing.
Every head in the Hall turned.
The doors opened, and cold air came in off the lake, and behind it came twelve soldiers in black coats with silver wolves pinned at the collar.
The pack dropped to its knees in a wave, even my uncle, even the man with the axe.
Only the man in front stayed on his feet.
He was tall, broad, dark-haired, with a pale scar through one eyebrow, and his eyes were amber.
King Evander Kray, Alpha King of the High Crown, who had not been expected for two more days.
He walked the length of the Hall without looking at anyone.
He stopped at the block, beside my outstretched hand.
He looked down at my cuffs.
"Who put iron on a wolf-blooded woman?" he said.
Under the iron, my skin went warm for the first time in twenty years.
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