The Alpha's Scentless Bride

CHAPTER TWO: What the Lowmarch Sent Back

I did not answer him.

Four hundred people watched me not answer him.

Then the hall broke.

"She's not marked."

"I can see that."

"It has never failed. Not once. Not in the records."

"Then look at her again."

A woman I had served bread to that morning took two steps backward. I watched her do it.

She was not backing away from a liar. She was backing away from something she could not name.

And then Renna Brant said it loud enough for the roof.

"Nineteen weeks."

The hall went quiet for her, which it had never once done before.

"Nineteen weeks she has walked around this house and not one of us could smell her. Not one." She turned in a circle so they all got it. "And every one of you decided that was manners."

Nobody hushed her.

Nobody hushed anyone.

That is the thing about being hated by somebody accurate. There is no part of it you can hold up and call unfair.

xxx

Mama Oyin got out of her chair.

She is seventy-four and it takes her a while, and four hundred people stood and waited for her to do it.

She crossed the stone. She looked at my neck. At the blood, and the ring of teeth, and the bare stripe under it.

Whatever went through her face, it was not surprise.

Then she turned to the hall and put both hands flat in front of her.

"I do not witness this."

Four words.

A mating is not made by an Alpha, and it is not made by a bite. It is made by the old women standing behind you agreeing that they saw it.

She had just told four hundred people that the thing they had watched with their own eyes had never happened.

She looked at me once while she said it.

Then she sat back down and did not speak again for a very long time, and I spent months believing that was cruelty.

xxx

"Clear the hall," Marek said.

He does not raise his voice. He has never had to.

They started moving. Two of the warriors came forward instead, hands already out, weight already forward, because there was a woman on her knees who had committed fraud against the pack and somebody always wants to be first.

Marek did not look at them.

"Touch her," he said, "and I will take the hand off at the wrist and give it to your mother."

They stopped.

He was not protecting me. I know the difference now.

He was making sure nobody in that hall got to touch me before he had decided what I was.

xxx

It took a long time to empty. People do not leave a room like that quickly.

I stayed on my knees. Nobody had told me to get up and my legs had not come back yet.

Marek Thorne stood over me with my blood drying on his mouth and said nothing for four minutes.

I counted. It is what I do.

"Nineteen weeks," he said.

"Yes."

"Every meal. Every council."

"Yes."

"The kitchen. Two in the morning. The chair."

"Yes."

"Was any of it true?"

There was an answer to that. It was all of it, every hour, that is the entire problem.

"Does it matter?" I said.

He went very still.

"Yes," he said. "It does."

And that is the sentence I would take back. Not the lie. Not the nineteen weeks. That one.

xxx

The doors opened at the far end of the hall.

Halden Marr came the whole length of it alone with a folder under his arm, walking faster than I had seen him walk in nineteen weeks.

"Alpha."

"Not now."

"Alpha." He stopped six feet away and did not lower his voice, which he would have done for anything else in the world. "It came at eight this evening. It has been on my desk since before the ceremony."

"And you opened it when?"

"When I heard."

Marek put his hand out.

I knew what it was before the folder came open. I had known for nineteen weeks that he had sent for it.

Every year of her life. From the day she was born.

The Lowmarch is slow. My father made sure of that.

But it is not four hundred miles of silence, and nineteen weeks is a long time, and there are four thousand people down there who have to buy their bread from somebody.

Marek read it twice.

Then he read one line of it out loud, and his voice did not change, which was worse than anything he could have done with it.

"Cassia Duvarr was seen in the Lowmarch on the eleventh. In the town by the mill. She is carrying a child and she is at least four months gone."

He lowered the paper.

"And the elder Duvarr daughter drowned in the spring," he said. "There is a stone in the yard with her name on it. Four hundred people attended the burial."

The hall was empty by then.

I had never been so glad of anything in my life.

xxx

He crouched down.

He did it slowly, the way big men do when they have learned that moving fast at somebody is a whole sentence on its own.

He put himself at my height. He took my chin again.

His thumb went across my mouth. He wiped his own blood off it and looked at what came away on his hand, and did not wipe that.

Then I did the thing that finished me.

I reached up and took his jaw, which I had never done, which nobody in that pack would have dared to do.

And I wiped my blood off his mouth with my thumb.

He let me.

Four minutes earlier he had offered to dismember a man for touching me, and now he knelt on that floor and let a fraud put her hand on his face.

Neither of us said anything about it.

I have never done anything braver or stupider in my life.

"There is a stone with her name on it," he said.

"Yes."

"You knew that. You knew it before I read it."

"Yes."

He looked at me the way you look at a room you thought you had finished measuring.

"Then who," said Marek Thorne, "did I just bite?"