The Alpha Rejected Me. His Father Claimed Me. · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 3: The Wasting Sickness

I ran.

I went through the tribunal door, down the tower stairs, out through the kitchen yard and over the wall, and then there was only the mountain and the smell of everything at once.

That's what nobody tells you. Not the running — the smell. Twenty-three years I had lived in a world with the volume turned almost all the way down, and now I could smell the frost coming three hours out, and old blood on the training ground, and my own sister's tears on the tower stairs, and a fox two ridges over that had eaten something it shouldn't have.

I ran until my lungs burned and the pack lights were small and yellow far below me.

He was waiting at the top.

He was in wolf form, and he was enormous, and he was the dark grey of wet slate — and when he saw me come up out of the treeline he went absolutely still, and stayed still for a long time.

Then he lay down in the snow.

An Alpha King. Lying down, in front of a rejected girl who had learned to walk on four legs about ninety seconds earlier, so that she would not be afraid.

I have loved him since that exact moment, and I did not tell him for a very long time.

* * *

We shifted back at the shelter cave, and he gave me his coat, and neither of us said anything about the fact that I had no clothes and did not care.

"White," he said at last.

"I know."

"Do you know what it means?"

"Bessa was praying." I pulled the coat tighter. "People don't pray at me. They usually just look somewhere else."

He crouched and started building a fire, and he took his time about answering, which I would learn was how he handled anything that hurt.

"There's a carving by the training ground," he said. "You've walked past it every day of your life."

"Sera." I said the name carefully. "Your mate."

"My mate." He fed a branch into the flame. "White, from the first shift. Which does not happen in a bloodline; it happens when the moon picks a Luna out of a generation and puts a hand on her. It has happened four times in eleven hundred years. Every one of them was born to a pack that had grown corrupt, and every one of them tore that pack open from the inside."

The fire caught. His face in it was not gentle.

"Sera did it here," he said. "She emptied out half my elders in three years. Trials for old thefts, old land grabs, three killings nobody had ever answered for. She made a great many people very frightened, and then she got sick."

Something cold walked up my back.

"Sick how?"

"Slowly. That was the cruelty of it." He looked into the fire. "Tired at first. Then her shift got difficult, then painful, then it stopped altogether. By the last winter she couldn't call her wolf at all, and she said it was like being buried alive in her own body. She died four days after her thirtieth birthday. The healers called it a wasting sickness."

"Kaenar."

"Yes," he said. "I worked it out at moonrise last night. Twenty years too late, when I smelled it on you."

He picked up a stick, snapped it, and threw it into the fire, and that small movement had more violence in it than everything he'd done in the hall.

"Her healer for the last two years of her life," he said, "was Bessa Thorne."

* * *

We came down at dawn and the pack knew before we reached the gate. You could feel it in the way the yard emptied.

They had put a guard on the healer's house. That told me they had already worked out that Bessa mattered, and that somebody wanted her mouth shut more than they wanted her alive.

We were too late anyway.

The door was open. Bessa was sitting in her chair by the window with her hands folded neatly in her lap, and her cup was on the table, and her cup was empty.

"She dosed herself," Kaenar said. He touched the side of her throat and then closed her eyes with his thumb. "Full strength. It would have been quick."

I stood in the doorway of the room where I'd had every childhood fever treated and felt nothing at all, and then felt everything, and had to hold the frame.

On the table beside the cup was a folded square of paper with one word on the outside, in a shaky hand.

Mira.

Inside, four lines.

I did what I was told, both times. I am sorry about your mother; she was kind to me and I did it anyway. Your father did not know at the start. He knew by the end. Ask him what he was paid, and ask who paid it.

I read it twice. Then I read the second line again, and the floor moved under me.

"My mother," I said. "She wrote your mother."

Kaenar took the paper out of my hand. I watched his eyes go down the lines and stop where mine had stopped.

"Your mother died of a wasting sickness," he said slowly, "the winter you were three."

"Yes."

"Tired at first. Then her shift got difficult."

I couldn't answer.

"Two white wolves," he said, and he said it like a man laying a stone on top of another stone. "Two Lunas the moon chose out of one valley in one generation. Both poisoned by the same hand. And then a third born, and dosed from three years old, so quietly that she reached twenty-three believing she was defective."

He folded the paper and put it inside his coat.

"This was never about my son's alliance," he said. "This has been somebody's twenty-year policy."

* * *

Kellan found us in the yard an hour later, and he had been running, and he had a cut over one eye that hadn't been there at dawn.

"Father." He barely got the word out. "Ironhollow's on the north road. Four hundred, in full colours. They'll be at the gate by noon."

"On what pretext?"

"They say we broke the marriage contract." Kellan wiped blood out of his eyebrow with the back of his wrist, and then he looked at me, properly, for the first time since the hall. Whatever was on his face I don't have a name for. Shame is the closest word and it isn't close enough. "Mira. I need to tell you what's in that contract."

"Say it."

"There are two names on the Ironhollow side," he said. "Not one. Their Alpha signed for a mating with a daughter of House Thorne — the wording is a daughter, not Elira. Your father drafted it that way in the spring." He swallowed. "The alliance was never Elira's to secure. She was the one they'd take if the other one couldn't be delivered."

The wind came down off the ridge and moved through the yard, and somewhere behind us the gate bell started to ring.

"Delivered," I repeated.

"Draven Ironhollow has been asking after you by name since the summer," Kellan said. "Not the Thorne heiress. Not the Alpha's daughter. Mira. He knew there was a third one. He's the only man on this mountain who ever seemed to think you were worth anything at all, and I have thought about that every hour since you knelt on that floor and I have not been able to make it mean anything good."