The Rejected Mate novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The East Room

The east room had been Willa's when she was small and slept over with Caelen's cousins.

It had the same blue quilt and the same crack in the plaster shaped like a river.

Its window looked down on the vegetable garden.

Nobody had told her whose idea it was to put her there.

Alpha Rufus had been told she'd stay three nights, and he had smiled with his teeth.

"Mend things with your sister," he'd said. "Family is everything."

Caelen had not come down to dinner.

His chair at the long table stood empty, and Willa had watched his father cut his meat and never once look at it.

After dinner she went out to the kitchen garden because she needed air that did not smell of lilies.

The Luna was kneeling in the herb beds with a trowel and a pair of old gloves.

She did not look up.

"Pull a few of the sage leaves for me, would you?" she said. "I'm out."

Willa knelt on the other side of the row and picked.

For a while there was only the sound of soil.

"You baked for the funeral," Odette said. "Four months ago. You and your mother brought the bread."

"We brought six loaves. The wake was in this house."

"Caelen was in the east wing that weekend."

"He was pale when he got out of the car."

"Who went up to see him?"

Willa sat back on her heels.

It was a strange question, and the Luna asked it as gently as a woman asking about the weather.

"The Alpha," she said slowly. "He carried a tray up himself, twice a day. I remember because I thought it was sweet."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Rejected Mate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.