Too Old for My Alpha, Worth the Wait for His Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twenty Years
At the anniversary feast Braden renounces the bond before the pack and crowns a pregnant 22-year-old; Catriona ends it first and walks out, and her silent wolf stands up.
Braden raised his hand, and the band stopped halfway through our song.
It was our twentieth anniversary, and the whole Cedar Fork pack had crowded into the lodge to toast us.
Two hundred wolves turned toward the head table, where I sat in the green dress he had picked out.
That morning he had kissed my forehead and told me not to worry about anything tonight.
I had thought it was a kindness.
"Before we cut the cake," Braden said, "I have something to tell the pack."
I thought he was going to thank me.
I had delivered half the pups in that room, and I had run this pack's clinic, kitchen and quarrels beside him since I was twenty-six.
He stood and buttoned his jacket.
He did not look at me.
"I am ending the chosen bond with Catriona, here, tonight, in front of all of you."
The room went so quiet I heard the cake knife tick against its plate.
"Cedar Fork needs an heir, and the heir has to be a son," Braden said. "Catriona is forty-six. In twenty years she has given me two daughters."
"I can't keep protecting her place here."
My place.
My father had built this lodge with his own hands.
My father's name was cut into the beam over the door.
Jolene Thomsen came up from the back table in a white dress, twenty-two years old, one hand spread over her stomach.
She had refilled my glass an hour ago and told me I looked lovely.
Now she stood at Braden's shoulder and looked at me with her chin up.
"The healer checked this week," she said. "It's a boy."
Somebody near the kitchen door gasped.
My elder daughter, Eliza, stood so fast her chair went over backward.
"Dad," she said. "Dad, no."
My younger daughter, sixteen, looked down at her plate and did not move.
Dora, my oldest friend, had both hands over her mouth at the next table.
Nobody else said a word.
I looked down the length of the room, and that was when I saw him.
Alexander Ashdown, Alpha of Ash Mountain, stood alone by the double doors in a dark coat.
Braden had driven north himself to invite him, the first time our two packs had shared a room in twenty years.
Braden had also kept the north road closed to me all that time, always for my safety, so I had seen Alexander once, across a crowded Gathering, the year I turned twenty-six.
He was not looking at Braden.
He was looking at me, and he had gone completely still.
I turned back to my husband.
Forty-six years old, two daughters, twenty years of Christmases and funerals and night births.
And he had picked a stage and an audience so I could not argue without begging.
I stood up.
The chair scraped, and every head in the room came around.
"Then say it properly, Braden," I said. "All of it. The pack is waiting to hear you say it."
His jaw tightened.
He had expected tears.
"I, Braden Hartwell, Alpha of Cedar Fork," he said, "release Catriona Hartwell from the chosen bond."
Something tore loose in my chest and went out through my ribs.
I put my hand flat on the table and stayed on my feet.
The room tilted, and it righted again.
"It's ended," I said. "Thank you for finally doing it in front of people."
I took off my wedding band and laid it in the cake plate, beside the knife.
Then I looked at Jolene.
"Drink water tonight," I told her. "You're thin for twelve weeks."
Her smile slipped.
I had nothing left to say to either of them.
So I walked out.
The doors were heavy, and nobody moved to open them, so I pushed them open myself.
Behind me I heard Eliza say, "Mom, wait," and the scrape of her shoes.
The cold October air hit my face, and I walked past the cars and the string lights to the edge of the gravel lot.
My chest hurt where the rope had been.
My hands would not stop shaking, so I held them against my stomach and breathed.
Then something moved inside me.
It was slow, and it was enormous.
A part of me that had lain down and gone silent twenty years ago lifted its head and stood up.
My wolf.
I had not felt her since I was twenty-six.
She was awake, she was standing, and she was facing north.
And on the wind, from the dark trees past the lot, I smelled pine smoke and cold iron.
I smelled him.
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