The Warlord of Wycliffe: The Dethroning of My False Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cruelest Mark
Roderick ties Elowen to the bed, claims her, and announces he will mark General Verity too. Elowen unties herself, refuses, and freezes the pack accounts. A stranger at the gate calls her Wycliffe.
"Elowen, in a few days I'm going to mark Verity Crane too."
Alpha Roderick Grimshaw said it warmly, like good news, while I was still lying on his chest, naked and soaked with his sweat.
He had kissed the red marks on my wrists first, as gently as he always did.
My lungs were burning.
The mattress under us was wet from both of us.
For two hours he had kept my wrists tied to the oak headboard with leather straps.
He had come home from the border war a week ago, and every night since, he had tied me down first.
I had told myself it was a year of wanting finally let out.
I had told myself that when he put out the lamp, he was being rough because he missed me.
Now his scent was all over my skin, and he was talking about another woman.
"She's the best general I have," Roderick said, and stroked my hair. "The pack needs a second mate who can fight."
I did not say anything.
"You don't have to worry," he went on. "You'll stay here. You'll keep doing the books, and nothing changes."
He gave my shoulder a pat, right on the bite mark he had put there a year ago.
The straps were loose now.
He had not noticed that I had been working at the left knot with my thumbnail for the last ten minutes.
I pulled my hand free.
Roderick stiffened.
He took his arm from around me, rolled off the bed and stood against the wall, watching my hand.
It was the same thing he had done the night before, when a strap slipped.
"Put it back," he said.
"No."
I untied the other wrist myself and sat up.
His eyes went to the floor, then to the door, then to my face again.
"Elowen. Lie down."
"Say it again," I said. "The part about the books."
He frowned. "You'll keep managing the pack's money. You've done it all year. Nobody else can read those ledgers."
"And you'll mark Verity."
"In a few days. At the Moon Hall, in front of everyone. It's an honor for her, and good for the pack."
I picked up my shirt from the floor.
My hands were shaking, but my voice was not.
"Roderick, do you know what the pack's food bill was last winter?"
He blinked. "I leave that to you."
"Do you know who paid it?"
"The treasury."
"The treasury was empty when you left for the war," I said. "It has been empty for a year."
I pulled the shirt over my head.
"The treasury is me."
He laughed, once, short and annoyed.
"Don't be dramatic. Your family's old money is a pack matter. It's mate law. What's yours is mine."
"Then what's mine is leaving."
I buttoned my jeans.
"You can't go anywhere," Roderick said. "You're an Omega, Elowen. The Wycliffes are dead. You have nobody. Who do you think will take you in?"
He said it softly, almost gently.
My mother was buried on the ridge in a grave Hester Bell had dug with her own hands.
My father and my brothers lay beside her.
I had not cried for any of them.
I had sealed away the thing inside me so that my mother would rest easy, and I had spent three years being small.
I looked at Roderick standing against the wall, with my scent still on him, and I felt that seal crack.
So I walked out.
I went down the dark hall barefoot, past the sleeping lodge, to the ledger room at the end of the east wing.
The terminal there was mine.
Everyone in Greyhollow knew the screen, and nobody knew the password.
I typed it in.
The pack's winter grain order was queued for payment.
So were the fuel contract, the war widows' pensions and the clinic's medicine.
Every one of them drew from the Wycliffe trust, the money my father had left to the only child who survived him.
I opened the trust page, and I clicked Freeze.
Then I cancelled each payment, one at a time, until the screen showed what Greyhollow actually owned.
Eleven hundred dollars.
Nineteen days of food.
I sat back.
The lodge was very quiet, and for the first time in three years, something inside me stirred and turned over.
Boots came pounding down the corridor.
Colm Radley, Roderick's beta, skidded into the doorway in his undershirt with his phone in his hand.
"The grain broker just called," he said. "The payment bounced. What did you do?"
"I stopped paying."
"Elowen, you can't." He went white. "The Alpha will lose his mind."
"Then he'd better learn to count."
Heavy footsteps came behind him, and Roderick filled the door with his shirt half buttoned.
"Undo it," he said. "Now."
"No."
His jaw flexed.
He crossed the room in three strides and grabbed my arm.
Out in the yard, the gate bell began to ring.
Two hard pulls, then one.
That meant a stranger had come to the gate, and he was not asking permission.
Roderick let go of me and went to the window.
A tall man was sitting a black horse in the grey light, with a dozen riders behind him.
I knew his scent already, even through the glass.
Smoke, pine and cold iron.
The man tipped his head back and called up to the lodge in a voice that carried across the whole yard.
"I am Dorian Stroud of Stormreach. I have come to see the last daughter of the Wycliffe generals."
Roderick's hand fell from my arm.
Nobody had said that name in Greyhollow for three years.
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