All Chapters of The Alpha’s Scentless Bride: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

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

The morning, Nadira said. It ran to dusk.Eleven feet of floor between his chair and mine. Six boards and a seventh that had been put in later out of something paler, and I know that because I counted them, and then counted them again, and by the fourth time I was not counting boards.I was doing the other sum.Nobody told me what I was for in that room. I was put in a chair at the end of a long table and left in it while men came in with papers and went out without them, and twice somebody asked me a question about the Lowmarch that I answered in under nine words.Marek did not speak to me once. He looked at me three times and none of the three lasted.He was eleven feet away for nine hours. That was the day.I know the rooms I sit in. It is not a talent. It is what you do instead of being spoken to.Two doors, the long one

His hands stopped.Two fingers on the top of my spine, not moving. The way a man stops reading when the sentence does not say what he expected it to say.I knew what he had found.You know the back of your own neck the way you know the back of your own head. From the outside. From what other people do not say about it.A woman in a kitchen put her hands there for about ninety seconds every Sunday for eleven years and never once mentioned it. Cassia's maid sighed at it and did not explain the sighing. Nobody in my life has ever told me how wide it was.I have put my own fingers on it. It is smoother than the rest of me and it runs cooler and it has never hurt, not once, and that is the whole of what I had.Two fingers wide was new information at twenty-two."Two fingers," he said. "Give or take. From the top of the spine, up,

I came back from the mourning list and my trunk was gone.Nine names. That is what I had after two hours with Nadira, out of forty-odd, and I was saying them under my breath on the stairs so as not to drop them. Then I came round the turn and the room had nothing in it.Nothing settled, he had said. Nothing settled, and the house had already moved me.xxxTwo men were carrying it along the east corridor and I went after them and did the thing I do.One. Two. Three. Four.Four doors between the bed I had slept in and the bed I was going to sleep in. I had that before we reached the end of the passage. The number was right. The answer was wrong, and it took me the rest of that day to find out why.Neither of them said a word the whole way, and two men carrying furniture do not usually manage that.At the door the older one put his end down and wiped his boots before he went in. The corridor was dry. There was no mat outside any other door I passed.I filed that and had nowhere to put it.