This Time, I Accept Your Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Folder
Elspeth dies in a freezing cell on her husband's order, wakes up fifty years earlier with the five princes' files in her lap, chooses the youngest over her father's wishes and bins every keepsake of Piers, and Piers is standing behind her: "You were reborn too, weren't you?"
"Get rid of it cleanly," my husband told the healer. "She doesn't deserve to carry my pups."
Then the King of the Lycans had his guards throw me into the cell under the east wing.
I was seventy-two years old and four months pregnant.
The stone floor was wet. Frost grew on the bars at night.
I lost the baby on the second night.
On the fourth night, I heard someone running down the stairs, and keys, and a fight.
An old man's face came up to the bars. Gray beard. A pale scar through his left eyebrow.
Prince Auden. My husband's youngest brother.
"Elspeth," he said. "Hold on. I've got you."
Then a guard's blade came down, and he fell against the door.
I died looking at him.
I opened my eyes on a velvet sofa.
I knew this room. It was my father's living room, in our villa on the south shore of Silverlake.
My hands were in my lap.
They were smooth. No spots. No scars from the shackles.
"Elspeth?"
My father, Elder Bertram Fairlie, sat across from me in his tweed jacket, his hair still more gray than silver.
He was holding out a thin file folder.
"The palace sent this over this morning," he said gently. "The Claiming can't be put off any longer."
I took it with fingers that didn't feel like mine.
"You're the Holy Maiden, sweetheart. The Moon speaks through you. Whichever prince's Claim you accept becomes your mate and the next Lycan King."
He nodded at the folder.
"Five sons. Have you decided?"
I opened it.
Five sheets of paper. Five photographs.
The first was Piers Ravensdale.
Black hair, cold blue eyes, mouth pressed into a line. He looked like a king even in a passport photo.
I remembered his hand on my chin, squeezing.
"Your wolf disgusts me. Your title disgusts me."
I remembered every night he took me and walked out before I could sit up.
I remembered the small blue bottle the healer held to my mouth. Three times.
"Piers is a fine young man," my father said. "The most capable of them, everyone says so."
He smiled at me.
"And you used to follow him around the palace when you were pups. Shall I tell them Piers?"
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I slid my finger past the first page, and the second, and the third, and the fourth.
I tapped the fifth photo.
A boy with messy blond hair and his collar on crooked, grinning like somebody had just told a dirty joke.
A pale scar through his left eyebrow.
"I choose Prince Auden Ravensdale."
My father stared at me.
"Auden? Elspeth, he turned nineteen last month."
"I know."
"He rides a motorbike into the lake on purpose. He's never been to a single Council meeting."
"I choose him," I said.
"Dad. I've made up my mind."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Whatever he saw in my face, he didn't argue with it.
He sighed and stood up.
"Then it's the Holy Maiden's decision," he said. "I'll drive over to the palace and tell the King."
The front door closed behind him.
I sat alone with the folder.
I turned back to the first page, to Piers.
In my first life, I'd chosen him without a second thought.
He was the boy I'd loved since I was six.
He'd stopped smiling at me the day after the Claiming.
His wolf wouldn't let mine within ten feet of him.
On our first night as mates, he went to the King's study and slept on the couch.
"You got the Claim you wanted, Elspeth," he'd said. "I didn't."
A month later, I found out about Lucinda Crowther.
His academy sweetheart. An apothecary's daughter.
The Council had refused her, so Piers took me and the crown, and kept her in the west house for fifty years.
He sat up all night with her when she had a cold.
He said the same thing to me every year.
"If there's a next life, choose someone else. I'd give up the whole crown to have had Lucinda."
I laughed out loud in my father's empty living room.
Fine, Piers.
You can have exactly what you asked for.
I closed the folder and went upstairs to my room.
It was full of him.
A little wolf he'd carved out of bone and given me when I was fourteen.
A silver pen he'd left at our dinner table.
Moon Festival photos I'd taken of him when he wasn't looking.
A gold cufflink he dropped on my floor at twenty, drunk, the one time he ever came to my room.
I shook out a black trash bag.
I dropped them in one at a time.
The bone wolf. The pen. Every photo. The cufflink last.
I tied the bag in a double knot and carried it down the stairs and out the front door.
The bin sat at the end of the gravel drive.
I lifted the lid and threw the bag in, hard.
"Elspeth."
The voice came from behind me.
Low. Cold. The voice I'd heard every day for fifty years.
I went very still.
Then I turned around.
Piers stood three steps away in a white shirt and black trousers, the sun behind him.
Tall, broad and twenty-seven, with that cold royal weight in the air around him that made other wolves look at the ground.
He looked at the bin. Then at me.
He came a step closer and stared at my face for a long time.
His lips parted.
Then his brows pulled together.
"You were reborn too," he said. "Weren't you?"
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend