Home / Werewolf / The Alpha’s Scentless Bride / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of The Alpha’s Scentless Bride: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

46 Chapters

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: A Refusal in the Chest

The word was yes.One syllable. I have said it ten thousand times and most of them were not true, and it was already in my mouth and built and ready to go.Something under my breastbone put a hand flat against it and would not let it out.xxxHe asked me whether I was sleeping.That is all. A man in a passage at the end of the afternoon, on his way somewhere, stopping for the length of time it takes to ask one question of somebody he sees every evening.It was the thirty-ninth day.I had been counting to that number since I watched a horse go out of the gate, and I had woken up inside it that morning the way you wake up inside a name day, and all through it I had done nothing but ordinary things at ordinary hours with my ears open.And it was day four of a cover that is supposed to give me six.

Last Updated : 2026-10-02

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: I Am Losing My Mind

I wrote it down.That is the whole of what I did about it. It is what I have always done about everything, and it is the only method I have ever been taught, and I learned it from a man who used it on me.It was a mistake. It did not become one for a long time, and I have never been able to decide whether I would do it again.xxxFour things, with a date against each.The first is the pressure under the breastbone. Twice now. The second time was the corridor with the yes in it, and the first was eleven days before that, at the north table, when somebody asked me what my mother had been like and I gave the answer I keep for it.I had not noticed the first one until I had the second one to hold it up against. That is how it works. One of anything is weather.The second is the wrist. There is somebody holding my wrist and there

Last Updated : 2026-10-03

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Letter That Was Opened

The seal was not broken.That is the first thing anybody gets wrong. A broken seal is an accident or a robbery. Nobody who opens letters for a living breaks anything, because the point is not to read the letter. The point is to read the letter and have it arrive.You warm the wax. You lift it whole, with the paper still under it, and when you are finished you press it back down and put the die on it again.And the second impression never sits where the first one sat.xxxThis one was a half turn off.The Duvarr seal has a boar on it, and the boar's ear runs up into the rim on the left side, and on my sister's letter the ear had two edges to it, one strong and one ghost, about the width of a thread apart.I know that because I carried letters for four years.From twelve to sixteen I took the post in on a t

Last Updated : 2026-10-04

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Useful

It took him four words.xxxA wall came down on the north road a little after nine, about two miles out, on the stretch where the cut goes through and the old revetment holds the bank up over the track.Two carts under it and a man under one of the carts.A boy came in on a pony with his face wet and could not get the sentence out in order.Halden had it out of him in about twenty seconds by asking him three things in the wrong order on purpose, and by the time the yard had filled up everybody in it knew the shape of the morning.Stone on a man. Two miles. Alive when the boy left.There is one thing that happens next and every person standing on those cobbles knew what it was.You go. You go now and you go at the front and you get under it yourself, because a pack does not have anything else that a pack i

Last Updated : 2026-10-05

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Almost

He turned a page and did not turn it back.The autumn accounts are four ledgers and a bundle of receipts and they are the dullest paper in that house.Grain in, grain out, what the mill took, what the smith took, what a man called Orrin was forgiven in the bad month and what he paid back in the good one. Column, column, total. There is nothing in any of it that could do a person harm.That is why I was there. It is the one set of books in Ashvale that has nothing to do with me, and I had been asked because I am quick at a column and because a bride who is good at something is easier for a household to place.One lamp, because a second lamp is a thing somebody has to be told to bring.xxxWe had been at it about an hour.There is a way an evening of work goes. You get a rhythm, and the rhythm does the talking, and after a whil

Last Updated : 2026-10-06

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Broken Jar

Ten past nine.I know the hour because the hall clock had just done it and I had counted the strokes without meaning to, which is a thing I do, and because it is the last ordinary minute of that week.xxxThe jar was on the boards at the foot of the press.That is not where it lives. It lives in the case, and the case lives under the press, and a jar comes out of the case when a jar is wanted and goes back into it when it is not.I had it out because the next morning was the seventh day and I like to have the next one where I can see it. That is a habit. I have had it since I was nine and it had never cost me anything before.I went past it for the lamp.My sleeve took it.xxxGrey glass does not shatter. It goes in three or four pieces with edges you could cut bread with, and what wa

Last Updated : 2026-10-07

CHAPTER 27: Day Eight

A boy carrying wood went past me in the east passage and turned round.xxxHe was ten or eleven and he had an armful of split birch up against his chest and he was going at the speed boys go at when a woman in the kitchens has told them to be quick.He got four paces past me and stopped and came about.And he looked at me with his whole face open. Not the way you look at a person. The way you look at a door in a wall you have walked past every day of your life and today there is a door in it.Then he said sorry.He had done nothing and there was nothing to be sorry for and he said it anyway, because his face had gone somewhere it had not been told to go and the only word he had for that was sorry, and then he went off down the passage fast with the wood.xxxThe second one was a girl on the back stair at

Last Updated : 2026-10-08

CHAPTER 28: Why She Does It

What I felt first was wrong, and I knew it was wrong while I felt it.She had found the lining.Three jars on the counterpane and the coat up in her hands by the shoulders, the way you hold a thing you are about to fold, with the inside seam open and six inches of my stitching hanging out of it.Renna Brant stood in the middle of that room and did not put any of it down.Her face gave me nothing whatever.I do not think it was nerve. It is what comes down on a person who has waited five weeks for a bad afternoon and got one, and it looks a great deal like composure.xxxI had gone up at four to be by myself.That was all the day was for. The thing in the passage the afternoon before had ended because Halden Marr ended it. He said the far farms wanted nine and it was in the book, and he said it to the wall.I went up the east stair to shut a door behind me.Neither of us said the obvious thing.It was mine to say and I did not say it. What are you doing. Then she says something, and we

Last Updated : 2026-10-09

CHAPTER 29: The First Kiss

I got one minute in twenty-two years, and I was not in the room for it.His mouth was on mine and I was counting.Three days before that I had sat on a bed, worked out what a frightened woman could not afford to lose, and arranged things so her losing it and my falling were one event.I had not written it down. I was carrying it about like a stone in a shoe, and what I had decided was to look later.What I had not got to is what a person like that does when the thing being priced is herself.I found out three days later, in a passage behind the kitchens.xxxThe stores passage runs from the kitchens to the cold room and has one lamp in it, at the kitchen end.Four yards along, the light stops. Not gradually. There is a place in it where you can see a person's hands and not their face.

Last Updated : 2026-10-10

CHAPTER 30: A Word She Does Not Know

Something called me by a name and I answered before I knew I had. The cover went on the fifth day. I had said it would. I worked it out on a floor with my back against a bed frame the night before last, and then I got up and went about the week like a woman who had been given a date. Being right cost me nothing that time. It is the last place in this account where those two things sit together. xxx I knew at about one in the morning. Not by anything anybody did. The house was asleep. I came awake the way you come awake when a number has finished itself without you, and I lay there working out which number it was, and it was th

Last Updated : 2026-10-11

1 2 3 4 5

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP