My Son Is the Secret That Will Break Them novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Not Half a Mark

"Ours," my wolf said.

I sat up in the dark with my hand clamped over my shoulder.

"What is it?" Torin was beside me at once, awake and alert.

"The scar. It's burning. And she's talking, she's saying..." I stopped.

He lifted my hand away from the mark.

The crescent was no longer pale.

It was a deep, living gold, the color of his eyes, and it pulsed with my heartbeat.

Torin stared at it.

Then he put his head down on the pillow and said, in a voice I had never heard from him, "Oh, thank God."

"Thank God for what?"

"That it's still there." He pushed up on one elbow. "That it never went out. Thea, I have to show you something, and I have to show you now, and I'm sorry about the hearing."

He reached over the side of the bed for his jacket and took out a folded page, soft at the creases.

I read it by the light of the gold on my shoulder.

It was an entry in a ledger, in Torin's square hand.

It gave a date five years old.

It named my full name, Thea Harrow.

It said: Claimed by T. Maddox, first bite, boathouse, left shoulder. Witnessed by the healer of the house.

Below, in a looping signature I knew from childhood, the old woman had signed it.

I read it twice.

"A claim," I said.

"Yes."

"I thought it was a mark that didn't take. I thought it was half a mating."

"There's no half," Torin said. "Under our law, the first bite from a Maddox wolf is the claim. The rest is ceremony."

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