The Wolfless Girl He Marked novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Silver Dress
Freja refuses a forced engagement before the whole pack, is lashed in the yard, and climbs out her window after overhearing that a stand-in will take her name at Thornfield.
My father rose between the soup and the roast, in front of sixty people, and I smiled up at him.
He had carried my plate to the table himself that evening and kissed the top of my head.
He tapped his glass with his signet ring, and said the pack to our south had agreed to take me in marriage at midwinter.
I knew their heir by his record.
Last spring he had put a Beta in the hospital over a parking space.
He hadn't bothered to come to dinner, and everyone at the long tables clapped anyway.
Every candle in the hall had gone out nine days earlier, when I stepped up to the awakening stone.
The elder relit them and called it a draft.
Then he told the pack I had no wolf, and my father stopped looking at me.
Since then he had been gentle with me, in the careful way a man handles a cracked glass.
My mother sat beside me with the silver-gray dress folded over her arm.
She had hung it in my closet that afternoon and told me to try it on later.
"It's only for a little while," she said, and patted my knee. "Your father is protecting you."
She had said the same words, in the same order, at lunch.
Across the table, Anson Greaves leaned over and asked to borrow my pen for the guest book.
He was twenty-three, polite, and my father's favorite visitor from the Greaves pack.
He signed with my steel pen, the one with my initials on it, and slid it into his jacket.
I was too busy staring at the Marlowe heir's empty chair to ask for it back.
I can smell a lie from across a room, and I have never told anyone, because a wolfless girl isn't supposed to smell anything.
When my mother said it the second time, the words smelled sour.
My mother had never smelled sour before.
So I stood up.
"No," I said. "I won't marry him."
The hall went so quiet I could hear the fire.
My father said my name once, low, and the beta by the door took my arm.
Pack law gave an Alpha one answer for a daughter who defied him in front of witnesses.
Fifteen lashes, in the yard, with the whole pack watching from the porch.
My father nodded to the beta.
The thermometer on the porch post read twelve below when they tied my wrists to the rail.
Sixty people watched from the porch, and none of them looked away.
The strap opened my back above the waist on the fourth stroke.
I counted the rest out loud, so they would all know I was still standing there.
My mother held my coat the entire time and never came down the steps.
Afterward Anson Greaves pressed a cup of water into my hands and told me I was brave.
His hands were warm and steady, and I drank all of it.
I lay facedown on my bed until the lodge went quiet.
My aunt Hedda lived three miles north, across the territory line, and she was the only person who still sent me birthday cards.
I had memorized her address the winter my father threw her out, and I had never once used it.
Tonight I would.
At midnight my father's voice came up through the heating vent from his study.
"The Greaves girl starts at Thornfield Academy on Friday," he said. "By midwinter nobody will remember another girl was ever called Freja Soderstrom."
"And the wolfless one?" the elder asked.
"She'll be a Marlowe's problem by then," my father said.
I pulled on my boots and my jacket and took the cash I had kept in my mattress for two years.
My window was on the second floor, and the snow under it was deep.
So I climbed out.
Someone was about to walk into Thornfield wearing my name, and I meant to be there before her.
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