The Beta's Son Never Knew Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Clip
Braden's birthday party, a video of him with Delaney lands in the pack group chat for a full minute, and Cassandra walks out; at the creek the Alpha finds her crying and says his silent wolf just said her name.
At nine o'clock, every phone in the living room buzzed at once, and mine was one of them.
Braden was turning twenty-five.
Most of the pack had come to eat his mother's cake and sing at him.
I was standing by the kitchen door with a wrapped box in my hands.
I was waiting for the song to end so I could give him his watch.
An hour earlier Braden had taken my wet coat at the door and found me the one chair with a cushion.
He had squeezed my hand and said I was the only person who ever got him the right thing.
Then he had gone upstairs to take a call, grinning, and told me he'd be right back.
His phone had been buzzing in his pocket all evening, but he'd laughed that off.
The pack group chat had a new video at the top.
I pressed play because everyone around me already had.
It was the back porch of this very house.
Braden had a woman against the railing, and his hand was in her hair.
The woman was Delaney, who had cut my bangs last spring and called me her best friend at my parents' memorial.
"Tell Cass I'm working late," Braden said in the video, and Delaney laughed into his mouth.
The video lasted about a minute, and I watched it twice.
Around me the room had gone quiet.
Forty people looked at their phones, and then forty people looked at me.
Delaney deleted it from the chat a minute after she posted it.
By then it had been seen.
A boy by the stereo said, "Oh no," in a small voice and looked at his shoes.
Lorna reached me first.
She put the cake knife down and wrapped both arms around me.
Everyone said she smelled of vanilla, but I have never been able to smell anything.
"Sweetheart, listen to me," she said into my hair. "That is a prank. Those children have been drinking. Braden would never."
"He said my name," I said. "In the video."
"Because they were joking about you. It's nothing. You know how boys are."
She was holding my shoulders and smiling, and her voice was soft and certain.
She had taken me in the week my parents were buried.
She had given me the room over her garage.
She handed me her blue thermos every morning, and she was already pressing it into my hands.
"Drink your tea, honey. It's your nerves. Let's go sit down and have some cake and we'll sort this out in the morning."
I looked at the thermos.
I looked at the stairs, because I could hear Braden laughing up there.
I had always had good ears, even if I had nothing else a wolf is supposed to have.
He was laughing with someone, and he did not sound like a man in trouble.
Nobody stopped him from coming down.
Nobody said, "Go get him."
They only watched me, forty people with their phones in their hands.
They were waiting to see whether the wolfless girl would cry in the middle of the room.
So I set the wrapped box on the cake table, next to the knife.
"Happy birthday," I said to the room.
I put the thermos down beside it.
Then I walked out the front door.
I got as far as the gravel road before I started running.
I ran past the Fir Cone diner, where my best friend Hattie had left the porch light on.
I ran past the pack hall, and I kept going when the pavement ended.
I ran until my lungs burned and my sneakers were soaked from the ditch.
I did not stop until I reached Dover Creek at the bottom of the ridge.
I sat down on a flat rock and put my face in my hands.
Four years.
I had spent four years being the girl who waited at the edge of every pack run with his jacket, because I could not follow.
I cried so hard I did not hear anyone come.
"You'll want this."
A man was standing at the edge of the trees, and he was holding out a dark canvas jacket at arm's length.
I knew him from the front of the Pack Hall and from the end of every long table.
Conall Kincaid, our Alpha, who spoke about ten words a month and had never once looked straight at me.
He was looking at me now.
"I'm fine," I said, and my voice broke on it.
"You're not," he said. "Take the jacket."
I took it.
It was warm all the way through.
His fingers touched mine for no longer than a second, and he went completely still.
He did not move for so long that I stopped crying to stare at him.
"What's your name?" he asked. "Your whole name."
"You know my name. I've worked in your library for three years."
"Say it anyway."
"Cassandra Greer."
His throat moved.
"My wolf has not spoken to me in eleven years," Conall said quietly. "Not once, since my father died."
"Okay," I said, because I did not know what else to say.
He looked at my hand, still holding his jacket.
"It just said your name."
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