Chapter 4. He Chose Me First

Weston's POV

She didn't speak to me for the first hour of the drive, and I didn't blame her.

We had the second car to ourselves, except for the driver and Bea Dunlap, who sat in the front seat with her purse on her knees and her eyes closed and announced, before we'd cleared the Cedar Run gate, "I'm asleep."

The clean towel I'd tied round Josie's hand at midnight had dried into the cut. I found the first-aid kit under the seat and held out my hand for hers. She looked at it for a long moment, then gave it to me without a word and turned to the window.

I soaked the towel loose with bottled water. She hissed through her teeth. Three butterfly strips, gauze, tape. Her pulse was going hard under my fingers, and she'd know mine was too; she can smell everything.

The other towel, the one soaked with her blood, was in my father's pocket. I'd watched him lift it off her pass on his way out of the kitchen, fold it twice, and put it away, and I'd said nothing, because I'm my father's son and I know what a court witch can read from a stain. A bloodline. A family. A name.

"Ask my son," he'd said to her. And now she was waiting for me to answer, and pretending she wasn't.

At the Blue Ridge overlook she finally turned around.

"Where do wolfless women go?"

"The Silver Abbey," I said.

"I've heard of it. A refuge."

"That's what they call it. It's a stone house in the Shenandoah behind a wall. The packs send the women who can't shift and haven't been claimed. They keep bees and sew linens for the royal houses. They don't come out." I made myself look at her. "Six years ago my father told me that if I went after you, that's where you'd go. And your father would lose his seat for raising you above yourself."

She was very still.

"So you went home," she said.

"So I went home."

"Because you were scared for me."

I could have said yes. It would have been true, and it would have been easier, and she'd have smelled the half I left out.

"Partly." I stopped. Started again. "And partly because I was twenty-seven and I wanted to be the heir nobody pitied. A Crown Prince with a wolfless mate is a joke in every pack from here to Georgia. I didn't want to be the joke." I looked down at her bandaged hand in mine. "That's the part I'm ashamed of. Not the fear. The pride."

She took her hand back. Carefully, the way you take back something you lent to a person you're no longer sure of.

"Thank you for telling me," she said. "It doesn't help."

"I didn't think it would."

From the front seat, Bea said, without opening her eyes, "Still asleep."

Ashford Court came up through the trees at eleven, gray stone and too many chimneys, the flag on the east tower. The staff came down the front steps in two lines. A footman reached into the back for her bag, a canvas duffel with CEDAR RUN KITCHEN stenciled on it in faded green.

I took it before he could.

Forty people saw me do it. So did Hugh Marsh, climbing out of my father's car, and my mother.

My father came up the steps beside me. He didn't look at the bag. He looked at Josie, the way he'd looked at her blood on the board, and went inside without a word.

Josie's POV

By lunchtime Ashford Court had a name for me, and it wasn't Miss Morrow.

"The cook-mate," a girl said on the back stairs, not quite under her breath. The girl beside her laughed. They both went quiet when they saw me on the landing with Bea, and Bea looked at them until they found somewhere else to be.

"Well," she said. "Could be worse. They could've called you the Luna."

They'd put me in the servants' wing: a narrow bed, a washstand, a window over the kitchen yard, a corridor that smelled of floor wax and cabbage. Bea had the room next door. Weston had stood in my doorway looking at the washstand the way my father once looked at a delivery driver who'd backed into his truck.

"This is temporary," he'd said.

"Your father's steward says it's appropriate."

"My father's steward can sleep in it."

Then somebody called him away, the way somebody always calls a prince away.

Lunch was worse.

The queen's ladies ate in a yellow sitting room off the east gallery, and somebody, possibly as a joke, had decided I should eat with them. Eight women in good wool and better jewelry, and me in my one decent blouse with a bandage the size of an oven mitt.

"Do you cook in that?" one of them asked kindly, and the others smiled into their soup.

She was the prettiest woman I'd ever seen up close, pale gold all over, like something made of butter and money. Margot Marsh, somebody murmured. The chancellor's daughter.

"No," I said. "I cook in an apron. It's a sort of cloth you tie on the front."

Nobody laughed. Margot smiled at me as if I'd done a trick. I ate my soup. It was underseasoned, and somebody had used dried thyme with fresh growing in a pot on the windowsill, and I sat there for forty minutes thinking about that, because it was easier than thinking about anything else.

The queen came in at the end. Tall and still, with her son's dark eyes in a face that gave nothing away. I stood, the way my mother raised me to.

"Thank you for your hospitality, ma'am."

"Don't thank me, Miss Morrow." Her voice was cool water, with something under it I couldn't name. "I haven't done anything for you yet."

Yet.

I was nearly at the stairs when Margot caught up with me in the gallery. She fell into step beside me as if we were friends, and leaned in, smelling of orris root and gardenia.

"I hope you're comfortable in the servants' wing," she said. "It must be strange. Being brought here like this."

"I've slept in stranger places."

"Oh, I'm sure." She smiled. "I only wanted to say, so there's no awkwardness later. He chose me first, you know. Two years ago."

I stopped walking.

"Ask him," Margot said softly, "about our betrothal."

She walked away down the gallery before I could answer. I was still standing there when my phone buzzed in my apron pocket. A number I didn't know.

UNKNOWN: Don't answer her. Not today.

UNKNOWN: You'll hear from me again tonight.