They Sold Me to the Ruined General, Now His Ghost Won't Let Go novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sign Here
At a family dinner where nobody passes him the bread, Idris is told to marry the ruined general. He signs, his omega scent breaks open, and the general's ghost bites his neck.
The marriage contract slid across the dinner table and stopped against Idris's soup bowl.
"Sign it," his mother said. "Marius has a fitting at nine."
Idris looked at the contract, then at the soup.
It was the third course, and nobody had passed him the bread.
At the head of the table his father cut his meat and did not look up.
"It's only a signature, Idris," Marius said from the next chair.
He wore white silk and the gold heir's pin on his collar, and his eyes were pink as though he had cried, although his plate was clean.
"You'd be doing the whole family a kindness."
"I'd be marrying a man who hasn't said a word in two years," Idris said.
"He doesn't need to talk," Odile Penhallow said. "He needs a husband on paper, so the Council can't take his lands while he sits there."
"And you picked me."
"A Beta with a flat core has nothing to lose." This was Edric, still not looking up. "The Marshal wants the Penhallow son. You are the Penhallow son who fits."
Idris was twenty years old, a Beta in a house of Alphas and Omegas, and the only one at this table who had ever been told he was a mistake.
He had also died once already, under a sky full of lightning, and he had not been polite about it.
He was not going to cry over soup.
The dining room door opened.
Two aides in grey stepped in, and between them walked the Marshal-General of the Fleet.
Dain Korrigan was twenty-nine, very tall, white-blond hair cropped close, a scar splitting his left eyebrow. His black uniform had no insignia on it.
His eyes were open and looked at nothing.
Beside him, shoulder-high, walked a grey wolf made of pale light.
Everyone at the table had stopped chewing. The wolf's lips peeled back, and a growl rolled down the whole length of the room.
Odile's hand went to her throat.
Marius pushed his chair back an inch.
The wolf crossed the carpet, ignored all three Penhallows, and pressed its huge head into Idris's knee.
"I don't have anything on me," Idris told it. "If I'd known you were coming, I'd have hidden a roll."
The wolf sat on his foot.
"Why is it doing that?" Marius whispered.
Nobody answered him, because Idris had just noticed the second Marshal.
He stood by the window with his arms folded, in the same black uniform, and his eyes were not empty at all.
They were grey and furious and fixed on Marius's chair, and then, slowly, they moved to Idris and stayed.
The curtain behind him did not move when he did.
Nobody else in the room looked at him.
Idris looked at the contract again.
He read the clause in the second paragraph. He read the one that said his name would go on the Korrigan registry.
He thought about the table, the soup, the bread basket that went around him every night.
Anything was better than this table.
"Hand me the pen," he said.
Marius actually smiled.
Edric's pen was heavy and warm from his pocket, and Idris signed with a flourish, because he would only get to do this once.
The last stroke of his name touched the paper.
Something in the back of his neck cracked open.
Heat ran down his spine. His breath went short, and then the whole room smelled of pine smoke and honey.
It was coming off him.
Edric's knife stopped. Marius's mouth fell open. Odile stood so fast her chair went over.
"That's impossible," she said. "The test said Beta."
The two aides had both taken a step back, their hands over their faces.
The Marshal's body did not move at all.
But the other one did.
He crossed the room in three strides and stood over Idris's chair, close enough that Idris felt the cold of him and the weight of him at once.
The pale hands came down on the arms of the chair, one on each side.
"Wait," Odile said. "Marius will go instead. He's the Omega. We'll fix the paper."
Nobody looked at her.
The shade bent until his mouth was at the new, hot spot on Idris's neck.
"Mine," he said, low and satisfied. "Nobody gets you back."
Then he bit down, and it hurt, and it was real.
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