The Alpha's Fine Print novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Bite

The pack hall was a log barn with a stone hearth at each end and a floor of scrubbed planks.

Thirty-one people stood in a ring when I walked in on Lorcan's arm, my hair still damp from the spring.

Nobody pretended not to know.

An old woman with a white braid stepped forward.

She was the oldest wolf in the pack, and her voice was dry as paper.

"Steward," she said. "We smell him on you, and you on him."

"It's pack custom that the Alpha asks the one he loves for a mark."

"A mark," I said.

"A bite on the shoulder. It doesn't scar, except in silver, and it never fades."

"It tells every wolf from here to Canada that you are his and he is yours."

The ring went quiet.

I looked at Lorcan.

He stood rigid beside me, jaw tight, eyes on the floor.

"You haven't asked me," I said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I swore I wouldn't ask you for anything you hadn't asked for first."

I loved him a little for it.

I turned to the old woman.

"The mark is between him and me," I said. "Not you, not the pack, not custom."

"If he wants to ask, he asks me. If I want to say yes, I say it."

"Nobody in this room tells me when."

She smiled, thin and satisfied.

"That's the right answer," she said. "We wanted to see if you'd give it."

A few of them laughed.

The ring broke.

Bess pushed through the crowd with a folder under her arm, her face odd and bright.

"Later," she mouthed at me. "Tonight. I need you to read something."

"Tonight," I agreed.

But when the evening came, the hall was empty and the fires were lit, and I walked in alone, and he was waiting.

He had spread a bearskin rug before the big hearth.

It was old and thick and the color of dark honey.

He knelt on it in his shirtsleeves, and the firelight turned his hair to copper.

"Come here," he said. Then, "Please."

I crossed the floor.

I stood in front of him with the heat of the fire on my back.

He looked up at me.

"May I ask you something?"

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