They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 01

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 01

Six years mated, and Kael Draven never once asked what my family does.

My father hunts wolves.

My sister keeps their skulls on shelves. Labeled. Alphabetized.

They let me marry one because I got on my knees and begged them to.

They made him sign it in blood: spill one drop of hers, and the Hunt comes home.

And tonight, seven months pregnant, my mate chained me to the Rendering Stone and had my wolf cut out of me.

For his assistant. Because she was born without one.

The Hollow was full of candles. They’d made it beautiful. That was the part I couldn’t get past — somebody had gone to the trouble of lighting two hundred candles for this.

“Kael.” The silver cuffs had already eaten through the skin of my wrists. “Look at me. Look at my stomach and then say it again.”

He didn’t look. He’d stopped looking at me somewhere around the third month.

“The Renderer says it’s survivable,” he said.

“The Renderer is her mother.”

“Vesper.” He said my name the way you’d move a chair out of a doorway. “You’ve had a wolf for twenty-nine years. Elara has had nothing. Not once. Not one run, not one shift, not one night of not being the only wolfless girl in a pack of wolves. You can’t understand what that does to a person.”

“I’m in labor in three weeks,” I said. “A Rendering will kill the pup. Every healer on this continent knows that. You know that.”

“Six months.” He crouched, finally, and I hated how my whole body still leaned toward him. Six years of bond doesn’t care what your dignity wants. “She borrows Sable for six months. She gets to run under a full moon once in her life. Then you take her back and we go on exactly as before.”

“And the baby?”

Kael Draven, Alpha of Thornfell, looked at the floor.

“Women have lost pups before,” he said. “You’re strong. You’ll carry another.”

Behind him, Elara Voss stood in a white shift with her hands folded, crying very prettily. She’d always been able to do that — cry without ruining her face.

“Vesper, I told him no,” she whispered. “I begged him. He wouldn’t listen. He loves me too much.”

I turned my head back to my mate.

“Last chance,” I said. “Unchain me and I’ll forget tonight happened. I’ll never say your name in front of my family.”

He laughed. He actually laughed.

“Your family.” He stood, straightening his cuffs. “Your family lives in a house with no road to it and hunts rabbits, Vesper. You’ve told me the same little ghost story for six years. Backwoods trappers with one good coat between them.”

“I said they hunt,” I said. “I never said what.”

“Enough.” Margit Voss came up the aisle with the silver hook laid across her forearms like an offering. “The moon’s at the top. Hold her.”

Four of my own pack’s warriors put their hands on me.

Men I had healed. Men whose winter debts I had paid out of my own account. One of them said sorry, Luna, under his breath, and pressed my shoulder into the stone anyway.

And that was when I stopped talking to them.

My right hand was still free enough to reach the chain at my throat — my mother’s ring, hanging there since I was nine years old. Plain silver. Ugly. A dark seam running through the band like a crack in ice.

Six years I’d worn it and never once broken the seal.

Six years I’d kept my mouth shut. Kept my father’s name out of my mate’s house. Kept the Warden’s coat folded in a box under our bed so he’d never have to feel small next to me.

I gave up my name for him. My sister didn’t speak to me for two years.

Do it, Sable said. My wolf. Low and flat and already bracing for the hook. Do it now, Vess.

I twisted the ring until the seam split and the edge bit into my palm.

Blood ran into silver.

Somewhere sixty miles east, in a cold stone house with no road to it, a ring on my father’s desk turned red.

Kael thought that ring would bring me nothing. A dead mother’s keepsake. A widow’s charm.

It wouldn’t.

It would bring the Pale Hunt — the ones who signed the Armistice, the ones every pack on this continent teaches its pups about so they’ll come home before dark.

Margit set the hook against my ribs.

I laid my head back on the stone and smiled up at two hundred candles.

“Run,” I told them all. “You’ve got until moonset.”