They Thought My Mate Chose Her novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cup Stands

Cador admits the wolf went to the dress, but the dowager rules the cup stands until the Rite, and at dawn Tressa brings Wenna the Luna-elect's order: three hundred robes, or lose the shop.

Three hundred heads turned from Merryn to me.

I felt every one of them.

"Sit down, Merryn," Clement said. He was smiling again, but it was thinner. "The boy's grieving. It's his first shift since the funeral in front of the whole pack. Knees go."

"Knees go," Merryn said. "On a man who carries boat engines?"

Somebody near the cider table laughed and turned it into a cough.

Tressa came to her father's side with the red skirts whispering against her ankles.

"She's been staring at him all month," she said. "Everybody knows it. This is a stunt."

I hadn't been staring at him all month.

He'd been slowing down outside my window all month.

There's a difference, and I wasn't going to explain it to her.

On the floor, Cador lifted his head.

His face was gray. Sweat stood on his forehead in the cold hall.

He got one foot under him, then the other, and he stood up.

Clement put a hand out to steady him.

Cador moved his arm out of reach.

"It isn't grief," he said.

His voice was rough, but it carried. The hall went still again.

"My wolf went to the dress," he said. "I was halfway across the floor before I knew it wasn't her."

Tressa's mouth fell open.

"I knew who it was when I shifted back," he said. "I poured the cup anyway. Clement had his hand on my arm, and you were all cheering, and I poured it."

He looked straight at Clement.

"That's on me. Nobody else."

You could have heard a pin hit the floorboards. I would know. I've dropped thousands.

Kitto's hand found my elbow and squeezed so hard it hurt.

"Oh, he's honest," he breathed. "That's worse. That's so much worse."

Clement's red face went a shade darker.

"Alpha," he said, very carefully, "the cup is poured. The pack drank."

"The cup is poured," Merryn agreed.

She came down off the elders' platform one step at a time, refusing every hand that reached for her.

She stopped in front of her grandson and looked up at him for a long moment.

Then she turned to the room.

"A poured cup stands until the Rite," she said. "That's the law, and I won't break it on a Saturday night because my grandson made a fool of himself. Twenty-eight days from now, the wolf walks again on the Point. The moon will sort out what the boy couldn't."

Tressa smiled.

Merryn didn't look at her.

She looked at me.

"Lowenna Treloar," she said. "You've had a minute. Is it still no?"

Every eye in that hall swung to the back of the room.

I thought about my dress form, standing empty beside my bed.

I thought about the cup in his hand, and his eyes on me while he poured it.

"It's still no," I said.

Cador shut his eyes, once.

"Then go home," Merryn said, not unkindly. "It's late, and you've given this pack enough to talk about till Christmas."

I went.

Kitto walked me the six blocks to Fifth Street with his coat around my shoulders and his mouth running the entire way.

"You rejected the Alpha. In the hall. In your mother's velvet. Wenna, you have to understand that I will be telling this story at your funeral."

"Good."

"I'm going to do the voices."

"I know you are."

He made me tea in my own kitchen and stood at my workroom door looking at the bare dress form.

He didn't say anything about it.

That was how I knew he was really worried.

I didn't sleep.

At six, the sky over the rooftops went from black to iron, and I came down to open the shop like any other Sunday.

There was a sheet of paper taped to the outside of my glass door.

NOTICE TO QUIT. NONPAYMENT OF RENT.

Three months, two thousand seven hundred dollars, seven days to pay or vacate.

Signed in blue ink. Clement Hocking, owner.

I read it twice.

Then I took out my mother's old receipt book from under the counter and turned to the H page.

Hocking, Tressa. Hem, three gowns. Hocking, Clement. Take in, two suits. Let out, two suits.

Two years of it.

Two thousand three hundred and eighty dollars, not one cent paid.

I was still holding the book when the bell over the door rang.

Tressa came in out of the cold wearing a white wool coat, with the hood of it pushed back off her shiny hair.

She had a manila folder under one arm.

She looked at the notice on my door, then at me, and her smile came slow.

"Oh, did Daddy get to you first? He's so efficient."

"What do you want, Tressa?"

She set the folder on my counter, right on top of my mother's receipt book.

"The Luna-elect commissions the Rite robes," she said. "Custom. Three hundred of them, hooded, charcoal wool, done by moonrise on Rite night."

She opened the folder with one pink fingernail.

"You're the only seamstress in Calumet. So I'm giving the job to you."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you're out of this shop in seven days." She leaned on the counter. "If you say yes, Daddy holds the notice till the Rite. But if one robe is missing at moonrise, Wenna, just one, you sign over your mother's machines and this lease."

She tapped the folder.

"Three hundred robes," she said. "Or lose the shop."

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