I Hid My Sister's Killer, So the Alpha Poured Truth Down My Throat novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Trial That Forced the Truth
In the Moot Hall the new Alpha pours a witch's truth serum down Brigid's throat in front of her parents and the whole pack, and asks who killed her sister; her first word is: Your.
They dragged me into the pack hall by the chains on my wrists.
The whole pack stood along both walls, three hundred people who had not said my name in fifteen years.
I had walked the last ten miles barefoot, so I left red prints on the stone floor.
My mother stood in the third row.
She saw me and turned her face to the wall.
My father looked at the floor between his boots.
At the door, the Beta had held it open for me and told the guards to loosen my chains.
He was the only person in that valley who had spoken to me kindly.
"Walk slowly, Brigid," he said. "Nobody is going to rush you."
I thought it was pity, and I was too tired to wonder about it.
I was thirty-six, and I weighed less than a girl of fourteen.
My ribs showed through my shirt, and I had coughed blood into my sleeve all morning.
On the dais stood Kellan Drummond in the black coat of his father, old Alpha Aldric.
Aldric had been dead three days, and Kellan had been Alpha for the same three.
When I last stood close to him he was thirteen, with scabbed knees and a gap in his teeth.
Now he looked down at me with his father's jaw and nothing else in his face.
"Brigid Harlow," he said.
His voice carried to the back wall.
"Fifteen years ago your sister Nessa was raped and murdered at the creek."
A woman near the front made a sound in her throat.
"She was nineteen," Kellan said. "You were the one who found her."
I said nothing.
"You burned her torn dress. You told the elders you saw nobody. You let the man who did it walk through this valley for fifteen years."
"Beast," somebody whispered.
"Traitor," said somebody else.
"Kellan," I said.
My voice cracked from thirst.
"Ask me alone. Send them out. Please."
Someone laughed.
"Alone, so you can lie to me again?" Kellan said. "No. Everyone in this hall has waited fifteen years for this."
"You don't understand what you're asking."
"I understand exactly what you did. You picked his hiding place over your own blood."
The hall roared.
My father lifted his head at last, and his eyes were wet and furious.
"Say her name," he shouted at me. "You never once said her name."
It was true, and I did not answer him.
Fifteen years ago he had stood on this same stone and sworn he had no elder daughter.
My mother had cut the Harlow name out of the family tree with a kitchen knife.
Nobody in that room had asked me why.
He raised one hand, and it went silent.
"Hester."
The pack's witch came down the aisle with a small clay cup between her stained hands.
She was a short, broad woman with a white braid and glasses on a cord.
"It's a truth draught," she told me, not unkindly. "It won't make you say a lie. It makes you answer the question you're asked."
Osric stepped in front of her.
"Allow me, Alpha," said Osric Roxburgh, the Beta. "You shouldn't have to carry it."
He took the cup out of Hester's hands.
She frowned and reached for it again, and he moved it out of her reach and smiled at her.
Then he put it in Kellan's palm.
The guards seized my arms.
I fought them.
I had been starving for fifteen years, and I still threw one of them into the wall before three more came.
They forced me down onto my knees.
Kellan caught my wrist to hold it still.
His thumb brushed the cord I wore there, a braid of red thread no thicker than a shoelace, knotted a little crooked by a child.
His face changed for half a breath.
Then he ripped it off my wrist and dropped it on the stone.
"Open her mouth," he said.
The guard dug his fingers into my jaw.
Kellan pried my lips apart with his thumb and tipped the cup.
It tasted of rust and burnt honey.
It went down hot and spread through my chest and my arms until my fingers curled.
I clamped my teeth shut on the last swallow.
My jaw opened anyway.
I had kept my mouth closed for fifteen years, through every beating and every winter and every curse.
I could not keep it closed now.
The words were already rising, heavy and hot, and I felt them in my teeth.
So I stopped fighting it.
I lifted my head and looked straight at Kellan.
I wanted him to see my face when it came out.
"Who killed Nessa?" he said.
The whole hall leaned in.
My mother turned from the wall at last.
The truth tore up out of me before I could close my throat around it.
"Your," I said.
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