Too Late, Alpha: I Died Carrying Your Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Moon Hole
At the Solstice Walk Garrick breaks Marit's hand and pushes her through the ice to save his first love, and a stranger's hand catches her as the bond tears.
At midnight on the winter solstice, with the whole Holmberg pack watching from the south shore, my mate ordered me to kneel at the ice hole and say I had killed his brother.
The hole was black and perfectly round, cut through two feet of ice and kept open all night with an ice saw.
Three hundred torches burned a quarter mile behind us, and not one wolf moved.
I was five months pregnant, and I had never set foot on this lake in my life.
Every other Solstice I had stood on the shore while my mother's cousin held my arm and kept me there.
I never knew why my legs locked at the edge.
Tonight Garrick had said, "Walk," in his Alpha's voice, and my legs had walked.
His first love, Linnea, walked beside me in her cream wool coat.
That afternoon she had braided my hair and brought me tea in a thermos.
"Whatever he says tonight," she had told me, "I'll be standing right next to you."
Her key ring clinked as she stepped.
A small red child's mitten hung from it, Eli's, which she said she had found on the shore the day he died and kept for Garrick ever since.
She had given it to him in the spring, and he had given it back and told her to keep it.
"Marit," Garrick said.
He stood on the far side of the hole with the pack's silver coin in his fist.
My mate of three years looked at me and I could not find him anywhere in his face.
"Linnea told me what happened to Eli," he said. "You were ten. You led my brother out onto thin ice and you let go of his hand."
"I don't remember that winter," I said. "You know I don't."
"Say it."
"I won't say something I can't remember doing."
"Then say you're sorry."
"For what? Garrick, I was a child. Ask Petra."
Petra, my mother's cousin, was somewhere in that crowd of torches, and she couldn't hear me.
He came around the hole and took my left hand out of my pocket.
"This is the hand," he said.
I tried to pull it back.
He held on, and he bent my smallest finger until it snapped.
The sound carried across the ice.
I did not scream.
I wasn't going to give three hundred wolves that.
"Say it, Marit."
"No."
He broke the next one.
Then the next.
Linnea put her hand over her mouth and said, "Garrick, please," in a voice so small it barely reached me.
She did not step between us.
When he had broken four of my fingers he stopped and waited.
My whole arm shook.
The scar across my palm, a hook I had always had, burned until I could hardly see.
I put my good hand over my belly.
"If I go into that water," I said, "your heir goes in with me."
His jaw moved.
For one breath I thought it had reached him.
"Then it goes in with the truth," he said.
He shoved me with both hands.
The edge of the hole struck the backs of my knees and I fell through it.
The cold closed over my head, and the sounds from the shore went out.
Above me, a long way up, I saw the round hole, and torchlight, and two shapes.
Linnea screamed his name.
The ice at the rim had cracked under her boots, and she was in to her waist, clawing at it.
I saw Garrick turn his back on me.
He dropped to his knees, caught her under the arms and dragged her out onto the ice.
He lifted her and carried her away across the lake, toward the torches, toward the trucks.
He did not look back at the hole.
Not once.
I sank.
My coat filled and pulled me down, and my broken hand fell open and stopped answering me.
The mate bond was still there, a hot thread running up out of my chest toward the man on the ice.
It tugged at me, and it wanted me to climb.
It wanted me to go back to him.
I thought of the pup turning slowly inside me.
I thought of my mate's hands on my fingers.
So I took the bond in my teeth and bit it in two.
It tore with a pain that went through every part of me, and far above me, through the water, I heard Garrick scream my name.
Then my lungs gave out, and my heart began to slow.
The pup kicked once, hard, against my palm.
Everything went white and quiet.
A hand closed on the back of my collar and wrenched me upward.
An arm locked around my chest, and a man's rough voice said, right against my ear, "I've got you."
"I've got both of 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