The Mate He Left in the Kitchen

Josie's POV

Gil Pruitt fired me between the trout and the venison. Twenty minutes later the Crown Prince walked out of our feast because of me, and the whole pack thought it was the food.

Pruitt didn't call it firing. He stood in my kitchen doorway in his funeral suit and said "transition" three times.

"After tonight, Chef Rourke's people take over the line," he said. "The council feels it's time. You'll stay on in prep, of course."

Two floors above us, a hundred and forty wolves and the entire royal family were waiting for their fish.

"With the crown here," Pruitt went on, "and Danny taking the seat tomorrow, the pack needs to present a certain…"

"Face," Bea said from the pastry bench, without looking up. "He means face, honey. Yours isn't the right one."

Pruitt went pink. He didn't argue.

Eight years I'd run this kitchen. Two floods, a measles quarantine, the winter the generator died, three meals a day, every day. And I'd still be, first and forever, the wolfless girl Walt Morrow found in a tree.

"One more thing," Pruitt said. "Tonight the servers carry every plate. Nobody from back of house goes up to the hall. The royal steward was very clear."

"And if somebody from back of house does?"

He stopped in the doorway. "Josie—"

"I'm asking."

"Then tomorrow," Pruitt said, quite gently, "there won't be a prep job either. The council was unanimous. I argued for prep." He looked at me the way people look at a dog they've decided to have put down. "Don't make me sorry I did."

He left. The door swung behind him twice and stopped.

On the board the venison rested under foil. Cedar Run deer off our own ridge, nine days hanging in my cold room, with a blackberry sauce from fruit the pups picked in August. My last service.

I untied my apron, the one with eight years on it, and took down the clean one I keep for weddings and funerals.

"I'm carrying the head table myself," I said.

Bea put down her knife. For a second I thought she'd tell me not to. Then she wiped her hands, came around the bench and tied my apron strings for me, tight, the way she did when I was fifteen and scared of the fryer.

"Then go," she said. "And don't you dare drop it."

The kitchen stairs come up behind a door hidden in the paneling, so I stepped into the great hall out of the wall, six hot plates on my arm. The noise hit first, then the heat, then the smell of all of them: my pack and the strangers the crown had brought, wool and cologne and wet coats and the hickory fire.

And under it, something else.

It went into me the way cold air goes into you after a fever. Creek water in March. Wet river stone. And something warm under that, something I knew and couldn't place, like a song you recognize from two notes.

My hands kept working; eight years of carrying hot food will do that. But under my ribs something had caught. A pull, low and specific, as if a hook had been set there and someone at the far end of the line was testing the weight.

Every girl in Cedar Run gets the talk about this at eighteen. It's how your wolf knows her mate.

I didn't have a wolf. I'd had the talk anyway, hands folded, while my mother tried so hard not to look sorry for me that I'd wanted to die.

I walked the length of the hall. Heads turned. Pruitt, three seats from the end, half rose out of his chair and sat back down when he saw who was watching him. By the wall behind the royal party, a narrow man with a notebook took one look at me breaking his orders and wrote something down.

My father saw me coming, and his eyebrows said oh, kiddo, what are you doing. My brother Danny grinned at me like I'd robbed a bank and he wanted a cut. "Pruitt's going to faint," he breathed as I passed. "Do it slower."

The king sat at the center: big, gray, handsome, with a farmer's hands and a smile he used like a pocketknife. I set the venison in front of him.

"Loin of Cedar Run deer, Your Majesty. Juniper and blackberry."

He looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he's thinking of buying.

"You're the cook," he said. "The foundling."

The hook under my ribs pulled so hard I nearly answered it instead of him.

I moved down the table. The queen thanked me in a voice like cool water, then looked past me at the chair beside her, then back at me, with an expression I couldn't read at all. A thin man with silver at his temples and a chancellor's chain didn't look at me at all.

And then the chair where the pull was coming from.

I saw his hand first, flat on the tablecloth. As I came closer it closed, slowly, until the knuckles went white. I didn't look at the rest of him until the plate was down, because I'm a professional, and because I was scared.

Then I looked.

Dark hair, cut short. A face that would have been severe if it weren't so tired. He was staring at me like I was headlights coming at him on the wrong side of the road.

Weston Ashford. The Crown Prince.

He put his napkin down and stood. Every wolf at the head table stopped chewing.

He walked out of the hall in the middle of the course, in front of his father and his mother and my entire pack, and he didn't take his eyes off my face once. He passed close enough that his sleeve brushed my wrist, and under the noise of a hundred and forty wolves I heard him say two words, so low they were meant for nobody but me.

"Not again."

The door swung shut behind him. When I turned back to the table, the king wasn't watching his son go. He was watching me.

"Must've been the venison."

Somebody at the visitors' table said it, not quite low enough, and it went around the great hall faster than the bread basket. A man laughed, a friendly, startled laugh, the kind you give when a stranger slips on ice. That made it worse.

"Thank you, Miss Morrow," the king said pleasantly. "That will be all."

I went back into the wall.

Danny caught me on the kitchen stairs. He'd taken them three at a time, and he had to duck the low beam that has been braining Morrow men for a hundred years.

"Josie. Pruitt's gone gray. Mom's asking for her pills. What happened?"

"I served the course."

"And the Crown Prince of the Eastern Packs got up and left."

"I noticed."

My brother was twenty-seven and would be Alpha by noon tomorrow. He'd been four when our father carried me out of the woods, and the first thing he ever said to me, according to family legend, was "You can have my room but not my truck." It was a plastic truck. I still have it.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Can you do something for me? Stay down here till they're gone. Just through the ceremony. Pruitt's going to make tonight about you, and I need tomorrow to be about the pack."

It was a fair thing to ask. He asked it gently. It still went in like a splinter.

"Sure," I said. "Where else would I be?"

Bea had the kettle on before I reached the bottom step. She put me on the stool by the dish pit and a mug in my hands, chamomile with too much honey, the way she'd made it when I was eleven and the other kids stopped inviting me to the river.

"How long's it been aching?" she said.

I looked up.

"Here." She tapped her own breastbone. "Since you walked into the hall. And it went off like a pulled tooth when he walked out."

"How do you know that?"

"I was married thirty-one years, baby. I watched it happen to me in a feed store." She set down the honey. "That's a bond."

"I don't have a wolf. I don't get a bond."

"Your nose never read that rule either."

She had me there. I can tell you if a cream's going to turn a day before it does. I can tell you which of the Pruitt boys has been smoking behind the church, and with which girl. Wolves with full shifts come to me to ask if their meat is off.

And right now my nose was telling me something I didn't want to know. Under the onions and the fryer and the bleach from the dish pit: creek water. Wet stone. Here, in my kitchen, threading through it like a draft. The pull under my ribs turned the way a compass needle turns, and pointed down.

The cellar.

"Take a rolling pin," Bea said.

"Why?"

"Because you're a woman going into a dark cellar after a strange man, and I raised you right."

I took the marble one, the heavy one. It felt ridiculous in my hand and also extremely good.

The cellar under the Cedar Run kitchen is older than the house. Stone steps worn into dips, one bulb on a string you have to know is there. I didn't pull it. I could smell him the whole way down, and on the sixth step I heard him breathing, fast and shallow, the way the pups breathe after a nightmare.

He was sitting on the bottom step with his head down and his hands locked together so hard the knuckles had gone white. He was shaking.

"Are you sick?" I said. "Because forty people upstairs are saying it was the venison, and I'd like to know before I say anything back to them."

He lifted his head. Up close his face was worse: young and old at once, with shadows under his eyes like thumbprints.

And the smell of him hit me all over again, down there in the dark, close enough to touch: creek water, wet stone, and something under it now that hadn't been in the hall. Something hot and raw, like a stove left burning in an empty house. The hook under my ribs pulled so hard I took a step down without meaning to.

He flinched as if I'd touched him.

"The venison was perfect," he said.

Then he stood, and pressed himself back against the wall so that the whole width of the stairs was between us, as if I were the one who might bite.

"Go back inside, Josie," he said. "Before my father gets a good look at you."