First Love Jumped So Made Pregnant Me Fall? Alpha Now Your Death Sentence Is My Love Letter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Moon Stone
Cade straps his eight-months-pregnant Luna to the Moon Stone over Lydia's fall, and Carys rejects him aloud in front of forty wolves before the chain drops her into the pool.
They strapped me to the Moon Stone in front of forty wolves, and my husband tied the last strap himself.
Two hours earlier, my husband's first love had gone off the old watch tower on the ridge.
I was in the kitchen when the bell rang.
Her honey jar sat open at my elbow, its lid crusted grey the way it always was, and I had just stirred a spoonful into my tea.
Then his Beta came through the door with his face white, and behind him came my husband, Cade.
He took me out of the house by the arm.
The place of judgment is a granite shelf over a black pool, a mile up the ridge path.
I walked the whole way with his fingers locked around my arm, eight months pregnant, one hand under my belly.
Nobody in the pack looked at me.
The pack's law-keeper was waiting at the shelf with the Law Book open on his arm.
Godfrey had brought me ginger tea every Sunday of my pregnancy, and he bent to me now with the same soft face.
"Breathe, child," he said. "Nothing goes wrong while I hold the book."
Then he drew a white chalk ring on the stone and told Cade to stand inside it and not step out until he had signed.
Cade stepped in.
I had never seen his face like that.
His eyes were red at the rims, and he was shaking.
"Lydia's eyes went black," he said. "I saw them. Her wolf went dark and it told her to jump."
"Cade."
"You went to her this afternoon."
"I told her the guest suite needed to be empty by Friday," I said. "That's all I said. I said it gently."
"Forty people heard her say you threw her out."
"I asked for my own house back."
His jaw worked.
"She jumped, Carys."
"I know she did. I didn't push her."
"You pushed her wolf," he said.
He took the pen from Godfrey's hand.
He signed the Sentence on the flat white page with a hand that did not stop shaking.
Then he stepped out of the ring and took the straps from the guards, and he laid me down on the Moon Stone himself.
The granite was freezing through my dress.
He buckled the strap over my chest.
He buckled the one across my thighs.
Over my belly he buckled the last one, loose, and his knuckles brushed the baby.
The baby kicked his hand.
His face did something terrible, and then it closed.
"The moon decides," Cade said, loud, to the pack. "Not me."
I looked past him at the sky, where the moon was just rising over the ridge, and then back at him.
My wolf had not spoken to me since March.
I had told myself it was the pregnancy.
I had no wolf to ask for help, and nobody on that shelf was going to give it.
I had a husband, and I had a voice.
So I used it.
"Cade Rutherford, Alpha of Stonegate," I said.
The shelf went quiet.
"I was your mate for two years, and I gave you everything I had. You tied our child's life to a stone because Lydia cried."
His head came up.
"I don't even know if it's a boy or a girl," I said. "I wanted to find out with you."
Somebody in the pack made a sound.
I spoke over it.
"I, Carys Harriman, refuse the bond. I give you back your name and I take back mine. Whatever the moon does tonight, you don't get to call me yours."
It is a short rite.
Every wolf in the Bitterroots knows the words, and almost nobody says them.
The bond tore in my chest, and I felt every inch of it go.
Cade made a noise I had never heard from him, and he put one hand flat on his own chest.
For a moment he looked like the one who had been strapped down.
"Carys," he said.
"Don't."
"Carys, I didn't--"
"Lower it," I said to the two guards at the chain, and to Rhys, who stood beside the winch with his hands white on the iron. "Don't make him say it twice."
Rhys looked at Cade.
Cade didn't speak.
He didn't give the order, and he didn't stop it.
Godfrey lifted his hand.
The chain ran out.
The Moon Stone tipped over the edge of the shelf and dropped, and the cold hit me all at once.
The water closed over my face, and then over everything.
I held my breath and watched the light go.
Black water, and the chain creaking, and my baby kicking and kicking against the strap.
My lungs began to burn.
The darkness went red at the edges.
Something woke inside me.
It was not my wolf.
It was smaller and hotter, and it was under my ribs where the baby was, and it came up my spine in one hot line.
Silver light poured out of my skin and filled the pool.
I saw the straps clearly for the first time.
I saw them part, one after another, and the leather fell away in strips.
The Moon Stone sank away under me.
I kicked toward the cold white edge of the cave wall, under the shelf, where no lantern could reach.
My head broke the surface.
Fingers closed hard around my wrist and dragged me up onto wet rock.
"Don't scream," Rhys said, in my ear, shaking.
He had come down the back stair in the dark.
He pulled me against his chest and put his jacket around me.
"Carys. Your baby just lit the whole pool. Every wolf up on that shelf saw it."
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