The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Running from the Bond
On the last night of her fourth unrelieved Heat, Clover walks out on the mate who locked her in a bathroom and files at the Registry, and the winged night volunteer who can't smell her Heat writes his own name as her rematch.
My fourth Heat ended the way the other three had, alone on a bathroom floor, and at one in the morning I walked out of my husband's house in my slippers.
The Beastkin Registry keeps its night desk open for emergencies.
I'd been there three times before.
Each time a volunteer gave me a pamphlet and a cup of water and sent me home.
Tonight the volunteer was a man so big he made the desk look like a child's.
He had a canvas work jacket on and stone dust in the creases of his knuckles.
He looked at my file. Then at me.
"Your partner still won't touch you?"
He didn't say it the way the others had.
He didn't say it like I was a joke.
I was shaking so hard my tail kept knocking the chair leg.
"No," I said. "He won't."
My fever was a hundred and three. My ears were burning at the tips.
Any other man in that room would have backed away from me by now.
A Heat scent fills a space like smoke. Kin men get stupid in it. Human men get uncomfortable.
He didn't move at all.
He got up, filled a paper cup at the cooler, and set it in front of me.
Then he went into the back and came out with an ice pack wrapped in a dish towel.
"Neck," he said.
I put it on my neck and nearly cried at how good it felt.
"How long has it been?" he asked.
"Two years."
"Since the bond?"
"Since the bond."
He wrote that down in a square, careful hand.
"Tell me about tonight."
I hadn't meant to tell him anything.
I told him everything.
Two years ago, my father's bakery owed Hallam Security more money than I'd ever see in my life.
Leonie Hallam, chair of the Registry Council, came to the funeral with a proposal.
Her son needed a kin bride. Her son was a lion. Lions bond for life.
The debt would go away.
I was twenty-four and I'd seen Leander Hallam across a room once, golden and laughing, and I thought, well, there are worse things.
On our wedding night he walked me to the guest room door and said good night.
He's slept in the main bedroom ever since. I've slept in the guest room.
The bond locks a bride's Heat to her mate.
Suppressants stop working. Nobody else can help.
Every three months, for four days, I begged him.
The first time he said he was tired.
The second time he said I was embarrassing myself.
The third time he didn't answer the door.
Tonight I'd heard a laugh through the wall at midnight.
A woman's laugh.
I knew it. Bettany Hoult. Two hundred thousand followers and a podcast about intentional living.
Leander's girlfriend since college.
I'd crawled down the hall with my teeth chattering and knocked on his door.
He opened it six inches.
Behind him, Bettany was sitting up in his bed in his shirt, scrolling on her phone.
She didn't even bother to look embarrassed.
"Clover," Leander said, like a man talking to a dog. "Go lock yourself in the bathroom until it passes. You know it passes."
"It's getting worse," I said. "Every time. The healer said the fifth one..."
"The healer works for my mother." He glanced back at the bed. "Don't do this in front of a guest."
Then he shut the door.
I heard Bettany say, "Oh my God, was that her? Her ears were all flat."
And he laughed.
I sat on the bathroom floor for three hours with my forehead on the edge of the tub.
When the worst of the cramps let go, I stood up.
I didn't pack.
I didn't leave a note.
I took my phone and my keys and walked out the front door, down the hill, all two miles to Wharf Street.
The volunteer had stopped writing.
His jaw had gone very tight.
"He said that," he said. "In those words."
"In those words."
He turned the form around to face me and slid a pen across.
"Then let's write it down in those words."
I looked at the top of the form.
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF BOND.
Under that, a second box. PETITION FOR REMATCH.
"I've been told three times that neglect isn't grounds," I said. "That it's a private matter between mates."
"It is what the Council says." He tapped the box. "That doesn't mean we stop filing it."
"We?"
He didn't answer.
He just pushed the ice pack back up my neck where it had slipped.
His hand was cool and heavy and careful.
When he leaned forward, his jacket shifted, and I saw the top of something folded flat against his back.
Dark. Leathery. Huge.
A wing.
"You're gargoyle-kin," I said.
"Mm."
"That's why you're not..." I waved a hand at the air between us. At my own smell, which I knew was filling the whole room.
"Stone blood," he said. "Your scent doesn't do anything to me. Your fever does."
He said it so plainly I laughed, and it hurt my ribs.
"That's why they put us on nights," he said. "Somebody has to be able to think in here."
I filled in every line.
Name. Mate's name. Date of bond. Number of Heats unrelieved. Four.
When I got to the description box, I wrote it all. The guest room. The bathroom. Go lock yourself in.
It took me forty minutes.
He brought me two more cups of water and a packet of crackers from his own coat.
At the bottom of the rematch page there was one box I couldn't fill.
NAME OF WILLING CANDIDATE.
I stared at it.
"I don't have anyone," I said. "That's sort of the whole problem."
"Without a candidate, the Council won't even schedule it."
"Then it's dead." I put the pen down. "I'll go back. I'll go back before he notices I'm gone."
"No," he said.
He turned the form around.
He picked up the pen.
In that square, careful hand, he wrote his own name in the box.
Orrin Wyck. Gargoyle-kin. Willing.
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