My Ex Sold Me for His Debts, Then My Brother's Enemy Claimed Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cup
Dean hands Willa a cup at the Midsummer fair, she wakes in a tavern cellar and hears her own sale, and the buyer walks in and says her name.
My boyfriend handed me a cup in front of two hundred wolves, and I drank every drop of it.
It was Midsummer in our market square, and the whole pack had come out.
Children ran under the paper lanterns with sparklers.
An old man grilled corn on a barrel.
The woman behind the pack fund stall handed out free cups of cider and wrote names in her little book.
"One for the pretty girl," she told Dean, and she set it apart from the others before she gave it to him.
I thought that was sweet.
Dean put his arm around my waist and kissed my temple.
"You've been on your feet since five," he said. "Drink it slow. I got you the one with honey, the way you like."
"Thanks, baby."
I had worked a double at the feed store, my feet hurt, and I was happy.
Across the square my brother Rhys stood with the elders, a head taller than all of them.
Nobody there knew he was my brother. That was his rule, not mine.
He caught my eye and tapped his neck, which meant check your scarf.
Rhys checked my scarf after every fair, for the smell of Cairnfell wolves.
He had done it since I was fourteen, and he had never told me why.
I wasn't wearing a scarf, because it was June, so I rolled my eyes at him.
He nodded once and went back to the elders.
A truck was waiting at the edge of the square to take him to the border for a meeting.
I turned back to Dean and drank.
The cider was sweet, and at the very bottom there was a bitter taste of metal that clung to my tongue.
Then my legs stopped being mine.
"Dean," I said.
The lanterns slid sideways, and my wolf, who always answers when I call, did not answer.
"I've got you, Willa," Dean said, loud enough for the people around us. "She's just tired, everyone. I'm taking her home."
Nobody looked twice.
That is the part I still can't think about for long.
Two hundred wolves smelled me go limp in his arms, and all they smelled was a man carrying his girlfriend home.
Dean's hands were gentle until we reached the alley behind the tavern.
Then they weren't.
...
I woke on a cold stone floor with my wrists in cuffs bolted to a pipe.
The cuffs were silver. My skin was already blistering where they touched it, and I couldn't shift.
It was a cellar, with barrels, a bare bulb and a smell of beer and old wood.
I knew it from Dean's stories. This was the back room of the Brindle Tavern on the river road, where he lost his money every Friday.
I kept my eyes shut and my breathing slow.
Dean was talking above me, low and fast, to a man I had never heard before.
"She's a pureblood," Dean said. "Both lines, clean, twenty-six. Hollowmere born. I told Odette's people three weeks ago."
"Your debt is ninety thousand," the man said.
"Your buyer pays more than that. He always does."
So it wasn't new.
Three weeks he had been planning this, and I had spent them on dinners and flowers and his head in my lap on the couch.
He had asked me to move in with him two days ago.
"And nobody will come looking?" the man asked.
"She's nobody," Dean said. "No family. Just a girl from the feed store. She told me so herself."
I had told him that because Rhys asked me to.
I opened my eyes.
Dean saw it first, and his face went white.
"Willa, baby, it's not what it looks like."
"Take these off me," I said.
"I can't. I owe them. I'm so sorry, I'll make it up to you."
It was the voice he had used all week, soft and easy and too smooth, and I had believed every word.
I looked at him for a long moment.
"You picked the wrong territory," I said.
He laughed, and it came out wrong.
Then the cellar door at the top of the stairs opened, and every wolf in the room went still.
Boots came down the steps.
A tall man in a black shirt stopped on the last stair, and the room filled with the scent of cedar smoke and rain.
My wrists burned.
Under the burn, in the bare skin where the silver touched, something pulsed once, hard, in time with nothing in the room.
"That's your buyer," Dean whispered, scrambling back. "That's Alpha Costa Rooke of Cairnfell."
Rooke. Cairnfell.
It was the one name my brother would never let me hear said out loud.
The man crossed the floor and crouched in front of me.
His hand closed around my cuffed wrist, and the pulse in my skin went through both of us.
He said it quietly, so that only I could hear.
"Hello, Thackeray."
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