My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cold Room

In the McCracken house she is served last and put in the cold room at the end of the hall, and through the wall at midnight she hears him say her stepmother's name and then, "Why."

He did not say a word for eleven miles.

The Ford climbed the south shoulder of the Knob with its heater roaring and the dash lights lit green on his hands.

He kept both of them on the wheel.

He drove straight and without a wasted motion.

I sat with my coat pulled shut and my thumbs rubbing together.

The propolis had gone tacky and dark.

It smelled of the hive, and I held on to that.

"Did you sign it?" I said.

"I will."

"That isn't what I asked."

His jaw moved.

"I did not sign it," he said. "I read it."

That was all.

The truck turned between two stone gateposts and went up a long gravel drive through terraced orchards, bare black trees in rows going up the hill in the headlights.

The big grey farmhouse sat at the top with a wraparound porch and every window lit.

There was a cider mill beside it, and a sawmill beyond, and the smell of apples hung over everything like a coat.

A dozen women stood on the porch.

They were McCracken women, in work dresses and cardigans, with their arms folded.

They watched me get down from the truck.

I had not asked him to open the door and he had not.

"This is Caly Lowry," Ned said, to all of them, and stopped.

I waited for the rest.

"She's to be fed," he said.

He walked into the house and left me on the gravel.

The women made a space in the doorway.

Nobody said welcome.

The long table in the kitchen had been laid for thirty.

A tall woman with a grey plait and arms like a stevedore took a plate from the oven and set it on the end of the bench.

It was the last place.

The beta sat nearest the head, on Ned's right, a heavy man with a thick red neck and an unfriendly eye.

He did not stand when I came in.

The women passed the dishes down the table, and every dish was empty when it reached me except the one the tall woman put down with a clank.

Greens and cornbread, and a piece of fatback.

I ate it.

I had eaten worse from a dying man's wife in a trailer with no heat.

At the head of the table Ned McCracken sat with his plate untouched.

"She does what the house says," he said.

He did not raise his voice.

He did not look at me.

"She does nothing the house doesn't. She sleeps where she's put. She takes no orders from anyone but me, and she gives none. She's under this roof under the law of the Knob, and not one of you lays a hand on her."

The beta's mouth twisted.

"And if she runs?"

"Then she runs," said Ned. "She's said she's free to. I heard her."

The table was silent.

I put down my fork.

"I'm sitting right here," I said.

Nobody answered.

The tall woman collected my plate before I was done with it.

She took me down the hall afterward without being asked.

The house had a long upstairs corridor with doors on both sides, and she opened the last one on the right.

It was a small, bare room with a narrow iron bed and a window that did not quite shut.

The cold met me in the doorway.

There was no rug.

There was a wood stove in the corner with a stack of split oak beside it.

The stove had been laid with kindling, paper and three good logs, ready for a match.

Somebody had done it today, before the Reckoning.

Before he knew me.

"The cold room," said the tall woman, flatly. "He keeps it for guests he doesn't want."

"Who laid the stove?"

She looked at me with no expression.

"I did," she said. "He told me to."

She went away.

I stood in the doorway.

My wolf was awake in my chest and would not lie down.

She was small and dark, quick, with a white tip to her tail, and she had been shy all my life.

She was not shy now.

She paced, and every time she turned she turned toward the wall I shared with the Alpha's room.

It was a pull, nothing but a pull, low in the ribs.

I had heard the old women in Laurel Gap talk about it in the church kitchen.

It tells you where he is.

It does not tell you what you want.

I lit the stove.

I sat on the narrow bed in my father's coat and took out my phone.

There was one text.

It was from my stepbrother.

*Cal I didnt have a choice. Dont be mad.*

I put the phone face down on the blanket.

Through the wall, in the next room, a floorboard creaked.

I did not move.

It was the Alpha's room.

The walls in that house were thin, old chestnut boards, and a man could have heard a mouse in them.

He was pacing too.

It went on for an hour, the long slow tread of a big man who would not sit.

Somewhere past midnight, it stopped.

I heard his phone ring, a flat buzz against wood.

He answered on the second ring.

"Verna," he said.

I sat up.

He listened for a long time.

I heard nothing of what she said.

I could only hear him, his voice low and level through the wall, and I made myself breathe slowly so as not to miss anything.

"No," he said. "No. That is not what we agreed."

Another silence.

Then, in a voice I had not heard from him all day, rough and almost frightened, he said, "Why."

I waited for him to say more.

I heard the phone go down on the boards.

I heard him sit on the bed, and the springs took his weight, and he did not make another sound.

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