Marriage to the Alpha

Chapter2

Three weeks after Alpha’s party, Elara was pinning sheets in the laundry yard when Kael found her for the ninth time.

“Does it have words?” He leaned against the wall as if he had no reason to be there. “The tune you hum.”

“It did once.”

“What were they?”

“I don’t remember.” She snapped a sheet taut. She remembered every one.

“You’re a poor liar, Ela. You go very still.”

She went very still. The corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile, and she pinned the next sheet too hard.

“Why do you keep coming here?” she asked at last. “A lord has better things to do than watch laundry.”

“I don’t know.” He scowled, irritated by his own answer, as though it had never happened to him before. “That is the problem. I always know.” He straightened. “Vale has offered me the Silver Moon estate and its pack. Forty wolves who have never had an Alpha. I have said yes, and I want you there. As my wife.”

Under her uniform, the locket lay cold against her ribs. The sheet slipped from her fingers into the dirt. “I am a maid.”

“You are the only person in this palace who looks at my face when she thinks I am not watching.”

“No.”

He nodded as though she had told him the weather, and left. The next day he came back, and she said no again.

On the third day he did not ask. He stood between two lines of wet sheets with his hands at his sides. “Tell me why,” he said, “and I will stop.”

She had no answer that did not end in her real name. The wind lifted the sheets around them. Across the cobbles a kitchen girl froze with a basket in her arms, then ran to tell everyone.

“Yes,” Elara said, and hated how quickly it came.

On the wedding morning, King Vale stopped her in the corridor and patted her hand as one pats a good horse. “A Nightshade tied to my kingdom is worth more than a princess, and a grateful Luna is a loyal one. Remember whose kitchen you came from.”

Seraphina waited in the dressing room doorway, in pale blue, bright as a winter morning. “A gift.” She slid a silver comb set with moonstones into Elara’s hair herself, and its teeth pressed her scalp a little too hard. “Be happy, Ela. I insist.”

Elara thanked her, because refusing would have cost more. In the register, the steward wrote Ela, no family, and nobody asked a second question.

In front of two hundred people, Kael took her hands. His palms were rough, scarred across the knuckles. “I do not have fine words. Ela, I will not be a man you have to be afraid of. That is all I promise. I intend to keep it.”

“I will not be afraid,” she said, and it was the first lie she told as his wife.

At the edge of the hall, Seraphina applauded with everyone else. She went on applauding a moment after the rest had stopped.

On her third morning as Luna, an elder named Marek eyed the chair beside Kael’s. “That seat,” he said, loud enough for the whole table, “was meant for a woman who has never carried a tray.”

Forty young wolves watched from the benches. Kael set down his cup. Elara touched his sleeve, lifted the jug, and filled Marek’s goblet to a hair below the rim, the way she had filled ten thousand others. “Then I am the only one here who knows how long a lord likes to wait for his wine.”

Somebody laughed. Marek drank, unsmiling, and set the goblet down hard. “Pretty trick. Wait until the pack asks you to bleed for it, girl. Pouring is easy.”

Nobody laughed then. Elara did not know what he meant by it, and suspected she would learn. Kael said nothing at all, and Elara felt that silence settle on her shoulders like a coat she would have to wear. Her hands wanted to shake. She kept them on the jug until they stopped.

Every night, he asked her to hum.

“The old one,” he murmured into the pillow, “the one with no words.” His desk drawer stood locked across the room, as always. Later, he said, whenever she looked, and she understood about locked things.

She hummed until his breathing slowed and his big hand loosened around hers. The shadows under his eyes faded, week by week. One night in the second month, she stopped humming.

“There is something I should tell you.”

His eyes opened. “My name,” she said. “It isn’t—”

“Ela.” He sat up, and for the first time his voice had an edge. “You keep beginning that sentence. I have not asked once. Do you know what it costs me, not asking?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and visibly gentled. “Tell me when you are ready. I spent thirty years among people who wanted something from me. You want nothing. I would like to keep believing that.”

She wanted something. She wanted this. The words she had been holding went back down into the dark where she kept them, and she lay down and hummed again, though the tune shook.

The letter came at breakfast. A rider in Nightshade black, mud to the knees, handed it to Kael without a word. The seal was dark wax stamped with a crowned wolf, and Elara knew it before he turned it over. She had last seen it on the banishment order nailed to her family’s gate.

Kael read it once, then laid it flat beside his plate and kept his hand on it, as if it might lift. “My father is coming to meet my wife. For the Moonrise Feast.”

“King Aldric?”

“He does not forgive easily, Ela. He hasn’t forgiven anything in eleven years. But he will like you.” He said it as though he was trying to convince himself.

Elara smiled and said she looked forward to it. She set down her spoon with great care.

It rattled against the saucer anyway.