The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Moon Feast
Alden rejects Isla in front of the whole pack for Margaux; the rot hits, the hall waits for her to accept, and she says no and walks out barefoot into the snow, where the warden captain is waiting.
Alden Mardell rejected me with a cup of cider still in his hand.
"I, Alden Mardell, reject you, Isla Fenner, as my mate."
He said it from the high table, loud enough for the back of the hall.
Three hundred wolves stopped eating.
I was standing in the middle of the floor with a tray of roast venison, because I'm a kitchen omega and it was the Moon Feast and somebody had to carry the meat.
Ten minutes earlier the pull had hit both of us at once.
I'd felt it under my ribs.
I'd watched it hit him too. His head came up from his plate. His nostrils flared.
He looked straight at me across the hall.
Then he looked at the tray in my hands, and the flour on my apron, and his face closed.
Now Margaux Delane rose from the seat beside him in her white dress and laid her hand on his arm.
The beta's daughter.
"Say it was a mistake, darling," she said, sweet as syrup. "Tell them who you really want."
"Margaux," Alden said. "I choose Margaux."
The hall clapped.
Not everyone. But enough.
The pain came two breaths later.
It started under my breastbone and ran out along my arms.
I looked down.
The veins in my wrists were turning black.
The tray tipped. Venison hit the floorboards. Somebody laughed.
Hot copper filled my mouth and dripped off my chin.
My nose was bleeding onto my apron.
Hettie Tolan shoved through the kitchen doors behind me and grabbed my elbow.
"Isla. Isla, breathe."
"I'm breathing."
"You're bleeding."
"I noticed."
I knew the law. Every wolf in the Greywater knows it before they can shift.
A rejection doesn't end when the one who rejects says it.
It ends when the one rejected answers: I accept.
Until then the bond doesn't break. It rots. In both of them.
Nobody in living memory had ever waited to find out how long that took.
The Alpha stood up at the head of the table. Alden's father. Gray at the temples, gold at his throat.
"Go on, girl," he said, the way you'd tell a dog to sit. "Accept it so we can eat."
The whole hall waited.
Margaux smiled at me over her cup.
Alden didn't look at me at all. He was looking at a spot on the wall above my head.
I had served him breakfast every morning for four years.
He knew my name because the cook shouted it.
I wiped my chin with the back of my black-veined hand.
"No," I said.
It came out small. I said it again, louder.
"No. I don't accept."
The quiet that came after was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
Alden's eyes finally came down to mine.
"You can't do that."
"I just did."
"You'll die."
"So will you," I said. "That's how it works, isn't it? Both of us. Your father taught it to me himself, in pack school."
His hand went to his chest.
Under the white of his collar, a thin black line had started at his throat.
Margaux saw it and stopped smiling.
The Alpha came down off the dais.
"You'll accept by morning," he said, quiet, close to my face. "Or I'll have you in the cellar until you do."
Hettie's grip on my elbow went tight.
I untied my apron.
I folded it once, set it on the nearest table, and stepped out of my kitchen shoes.
Bare feet on the cold boards.
My mother used to do that. Kick her shoes off the second she came in the door.
"I quit," I said to the room.
Then I walked out of the Mardell hall in my bare feet, with the black climbing my arms.
Nobody stopped me.
I think they were too shocked to remember they could.
The first snow of the year was coming down on the yard.
I didn't stop for my coat.
I took the ridge road out of the valley because it was the only road that didn't go past the Alpha's house.
The pain came in waves.
Every few steps I had to stop with my hands on my knees and spit blood in the snow.
I didn't know where I was going.
I only knew I wasn't going back in that cellar.
Half a mile up, a man was leaning on the stone marker where the pack road ends.
He wore a long oilskin coat and no gloves. His black hair was tied back. There were thin lines drawn across the backs of his hands, like old scars in a pattern.
He watched me come up the road without moving.
"You're the omega who said no," he said.
"News travels."
"Your voice carries." He nodded at my feet. "You took your shoes off."
"I quit my job."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It might have been a smile.
"Conall Strome," he said. "I hold the Line."
The wardens. The ones my pack called cursed blood.
The ones who were supposed to be dead.
He crouched in the snow in front of me and turned my wrist over in his bare hand, looking at the black.
"Your mother kicked her shoes off at the door too," he said.
My heart stopped.
"You knew my mother?"
"She trained me." He looked up at me. "She was a warden, Isla. So are you. This valley was salted against your kind. Come up the mountain, and the ground will keep you alive."
He stood and held out his hand.
"The Trials start at dawn."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend