My Mate Didn't Want Me, So I Refused Him Louder novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Hundred Phones
At the pack Gathering Linnea's bond lights up for the Alpha, who tells the hall he doesn't want a mate, and she says the refusal words first; her wolf wakes and howls his name.
Everyone says the day you meet your mate is the best day of your life.
Nobody tells you what to do when he looks right at you and says he doesn't want you.
If I could go back to this morning, I'd stay in bed with the blanket over my head.
I didn't. So here is what happened.
"Hold still," Ingrid said, and pinned the last curl behind my ear.
We were in the back hall of Hauge Lodge, and through the double doors I could hear two hundred wolves talking at once.
It was the Pinewater Gathering, the one night a year the whole pack comes together, and the other packs watch it online.
I had never been to one.
Wolves with no wolf don't get invited, and at twenty-four I still had never shifted.
"I still don't see why I'm here," I said.
"Because I put your name on the list myself." Ingrid grinned at me in the mirror. "I keep the Alpha's calendar. If I say you're coming, you're coming."
The silver cuff on her left wrist clinked against the brush. She wore it every day, even to bed.
She had been my best friend since we were eight, and she had never once let me hide at home.
"The green looks incredible on you," she said. "Walk in like you own the place, Lin."
"I'm going to stand by the wall and eat the little sausages."
"Do that, then. But do it in my dress."
I laughed, and she squeezed my shoulders, and we went in.
The great hall smelled like woodsmoke, wet wool and roasting meat.
Phones were up everywhere, filming the long tables and the fire.
I was halfway toward the sausages when a new smell cut through all the others.
Pine smoke and cold iron.
My knees went soft.
I caught the back of a chair, and the girl next to me looked over and said, "Are you okay?"
I couldn't answer her.
Every part of me had turned toward the front of the hall.
Torin Hauge, the Alpha, was standing on the dais beside his uncle, a white-haired man in a cardigan.
I had seen him from a distance all my life. He was tall, dark-haired, and he never smiled.
He wore a black leather glove on his left hand and kept that hand in his pocket.
He had stopped mid-sentence.
His head came up slowly, and he looked straight down the length of the hall at me.
His eyes were gold.
The talking died one table at a time.
"Mate," somebody whispered near me, and the whisper ran through the room.
I wanted to smile, I think. I wanted to run to him.
Then his uncle leaned over and said something quietly in his ear.
I watched the gold go out of Torin's eyes.
His brother Anders said, "Tor?" and Torin didn't look at him.
He came down off the dais and walked the whole length of the hall until he stopped five feet from me.
Up close he smelled even better, and that was the worst part.
"Linnea Aaberg," he said, loud enough for the back wall.
"Yes." My voice cracked.
"I'm Alpha of this pack, and I've decided to take no mate. Not this year. Not you."
Somebody laughed.
"You smell like nothing to me," he said.
Two hundred phones were pointed at my face.
I could feel the heat climbing my neck, and my eyes stung, and I looked for Ingrid and found her pushing through the crowd toward me with her hand over her mouth.
I thought, I am going to cry in front of everyone I have ever known.
Then I thought, no.
He had said it to the whole room, so I would say it to the whole room.
So I stepped forward until we were almost touching, and I lifted my chin.
"I, Linnea Aaberg, refuse you as my mate," I said.
I said every word of it clearly, the way my grandmother Oda taught me when I was ten and asked her what a refusal sounded like.
The hall went silent.
Torin flinched. It was small, but I saw it.
His uncle said gently, "A refusal has to be answered at the Moon Stone within thirty days, Torin."
Torin said nothing at all.
He turned around and walked out the side door into the snow, and the door banged behind him.
I made it to the parking lot before my legs gave out.
Ingrid got me into her car and held my hair back while I was sick behind the front tire.
"I've got you," she kept saying. "Forget him. I've got you."
By the time she pulled onto the county road, the video already had forty thousand views.
I watched the number go up on my phone.
Then something in my chest turned over and stood up.
It had been asleep for twenty-four years, and it did not feel like me.
It lifted its head and howled one word inside my ribs, and the word was his name.
Ingrid kept her eyes on the road. "Well," she said. "That's one way to wake up."
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