All Chapters of The Alpha’s Scentless Bride: Chapter 1 - Chapter 3

He had his mouth on my throat in front of four hundred people, and I was going to let him.That is the part nobody believed afterward. They all wanted it to have been force. It would have been so much easier to explain.His hand was on my jaw. Not gripping. Resting, the way you steady something you would rather not drop, his thumb under my ear where the pulse sits, and I remember thinking that he had worked out in advance how to do this, and had decided to do it kindly.I counted the candles along the north wall. Eleven.I count things when I need my body to stay where I have put it.The hall had gone so quiet I could hear rain on a roof three floors above us. Four hundred wolves. Not one of them breathing hard. They had come to watch their Alpha take a Luna, and a marking is the only private thing in this world that everybody is invited to.Before any of that he had moved my hair.He did it with the backs of two fingers, lifting it off my shoulder and laying it forward, the way you h

Nineteen weeks before he put his teeth in me, I sat in the back of my father's car and watched four hundred people bury me.It rained the whole time. It always rains in the Lowmarch.I counted the mourners because I had to do something with my hands. Four hundred and six. I had lived in that house for twenty-two years and I could not have named forty of them.My father spoke for eleven minutes.He said I had been a quiet child. He said I had been gentle with the dogs. He said the Goddess takes the soft ones early because she cannot stand to watch the world get at them.A woman near the back made a sound like something tearing.She believed him. She stood in the rain for a girl she had never once spoken to, and she meant all of it.Cassia cried harder than anyone.That was the part I had not prepared for. I was ready for the arranged and photographable grief she had been practising since she was nine. Instead she stood at our father's elbow with her hair coming down and her mouth ruine