This Time, I Accept Your Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: What He Lost

Piers admits he woke up too and offers to give up Lucinda if she takes his Claim; she walks inside, and her father calls: Prince Auden has refused her in front of the whole royal table.

I didn't answer him.

I didn't have to.

He'd seen it in my face, the same way I'd just seen it in his.

My wolf lay flat inside my chest with her ears pinned back.

She'd lain like that every day of my marriage.

Piers looked past me at the bin.

"The bone wolf," he said. "You kept it on the windowsill in the north room. Fifty years."

"I'm aware of where I kept it."

"And now it's in the trash."

"That's usually where trash goes."

His jaw moved.

In my first life, that look had meant a door slamming somewhere in the palace an hour later.

Now it meant nothing.

He was twenty-seven, and I was twenty-two, and he had never yet put his hand on my chin.

"Do you know what happened after you died?" he asked.

"I was dead, Piers. I missed it."

"The healer came up from the cells and told me at dinner."

He said it flatly, like a report from the border.

"Within the hour I gave the guard captain an order. Nothing came out but my own voice."

I stared at him.

"The Voice," I said.

"Gone. Like a candle. Every wolf in the hall felt it go."

He took a breath through his nose.

"The great Alphas rose before midnight. They'd been waiting fifty years for a reason."

"And Lucinda?"

His eyes flicked away from mine.

"She left in the morning. With the Alpha who led them."

The wind came off the lake and moved the pines along the drive.

I smelled cut grass and lake water and him.

Cedar and cold iron, the scent I'd once pressed my face into his coats to find.

It turned my stomach now.

"I died on the palace steps that winter," he said. "Then I woke up in my old room this morning."

"And came straight here."

"My father's footman said the Fairlie girl had been sent the folder."

He took one more step.

The royal weight came off him, and some old animal part of me wanted to drop my eyes.

I didn't.

"The crown died with you, Elspeth. Do you understand? It's not mine without you."

"I understand perfectly."

"Then listen."

He lowered his voice.

"I'll send Lucinda away. Today. She'll leave Silverlake, and you'll never see her again."

I laughed.

I couldn't help it.

"You'll send her away."

"Take my Claim, and you'll have everything you wanted the first time. I'll mark you properly. I'll sleep in your bed. I'll give you pups."

Something hot went through me.

Not want.

Rage, so clean and bright I felt my canines ache in my gums.

"You'll give me pups," I said.

"Yes."

"You had the healer pour three of them out of me."

He flinched.

It was small, but I saw it.

"That was the Writ. The Council wanted an heir from the right..."

"The Council wanted an heir. You wanted Lucinda's."

He didn't deny it.

"Do you know what you said to me every year, Piers? On the night of the Claiming?"

His mouth tightened.

He knew.

I said it anyway.

"If there's a next life, choose someone else. I'd give up the whole crown to have had Lucinda."

I spread my hands.

"Here's the next life. I chose someone else. Go and have Lucinda."

"That was a different man talking."

"It was you. You said it over and over."

"Elspeth."

"You asked for this every day for fifty years," I said. "I'm only giving it to you."

I walked past him toward the house.

"Who?" he said behind me.

I kept walking.

"Who did you choose?"

I stopped on the front step and turned.

"Ask your father tonight. Mine's on his way to tell him."

He went very still.

Then his nostrils flared, and I watched him work it out.

Only one of his brothers had ever come down the stairs to my cell.

"Auden," he said. "You chose Auden."

I said nothing.

"He's a child. He sets bones and falls off motorbikes."

"He's nineteen."

"He was soft his whole life. Did you know he broke into the east wing the night you died?"

My hand closed on the doorframe.

"I know," I said. "I watched your guards kill him."

Piers's face didn't change at all.

"He always did pick the losing side," he said.

My wolf came up off the floor of my chest in one surge.

My vision went sharp and gold at the edges.

I shut the door in his face before she could get out.

I stood in the hall with my back against it, breathing, until I heard his car start on the gravel and pull away.

Then I went to the kitchen and washed my hands.

I washed them a long time.

The afternoon went slowly.

I sat at the window and watched the boats on the lake.

The palace sat on the north shore, gray stone and tall chimneys, small with distance.

Somewhere inside it, my father was telling the King.

Somewhere inside it, a boy with a scar through his eyebrow was finding out who he was going to marry.

At seven, the phone in the hall rang.

I picked it up on the second ring.

"Elspeth."

My father's voice was tight and quiet.

Behind him I could hear a room full of people, cutlery, a man laughing too loudly.

"Dad? What's wrong?"

"I'm at the King's dinner. I told him at the table, the way it's done."

"And?"

He breathed out.

"Prince Auden stood up in front of his brothers and half the court, sweetheart."

There was a pause.

"He refused your Claim."

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