CHAPTER 3
1124 Words
SCARLETT
The floor was cold under my bare feet, and I had no idea whose house I was standing in.
Dark wood walls stretched down the hallway, lit only by a few low lamps. The air smelled like cedar smoke and rain, nothing like my father's pack house, nothing like the chapel I had run from. Somewhere outside, the storm was still going, rain hitting tall windows in steady waves.
I did not remember walking out of the bedroom. One minute I was lying under a thick blanket in a shirt that smelled like cedar and rain, the next I was standing in this dark hallway, drawn forward by a deep voice coming from behind a half open door.
"...I have her," the voice said. "She's safe. No, Wilder doesn't know where she is, and he's not going to find out from me."
My heart slammed against my ribs.
"She's pregnant," he said, lower now, almost a growl. "About six weeks, maybe seven. Doesn't matter whose it is. While she's under my roof, nothing touches her."
My hand pressed flat against the wall to keep myself standing.
He knew. Whoever this man was, he already knew about the baby, a secret I had not even told my own sister.
I pushed the door open before I could think better of it.
The man on the other side of the room turned, phone still at his ear, and every thought in my head went silent at once.
He was tall. Taller than Zane, broader through the shoulders, dressed in a black shirt that looked like it had been thrown on in a hurry, sleeves shoved up his forearms. Dark hair, damp like he had been caught in the rain. And his eyes, even in the dim light of the room, held a faint gold ring around the edges, like embers that had not fully gone out.
I knew those eyes. I had seen them right before everything went black.
"I have to go," he said into the phone, and ended the call without waiting for a reply.
"Who are you?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted.
"Axel," he said simply, sliding the phone into his pocket. "You crashed your car about an hour ago. I pulled you out before Wilder's security found you."
The name Wilder hit me like a slap, and the whole night came rushing back. The storage room. Ivy's dress pushed up around her waist. Zane's voice calling our baby nothing.
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly aware that I was wearing someone else's shirt and nothing else. "Where are my clothes?"
"Ruined. Soaked through and torn from the crash. One of my staff changed you and cleaned the cut on your head. Nothing else happened, if that's what you're asking."
Heat rushed up my neck, half embarrassment, half something I refused to name. "I wasn't asking that."
"You were thinking it," he said, and there was the smallest curve at the corner of his mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
I should have been afraid. A stranger had pulled me out of a wreck, brought me to his home, and was now standing close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin, like he was burning from the inside. Instead, my whole body felt strange, too aware, too alive, like every nerve under my skin had woken up at the same time his eyes met mine.
"Why would you hide me from Zane's people?" I asked. "You don't even know me."
Something shifted behind his expression, quick and dark. "Let's just say I don't owe Zane Wilder any favors."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting tonight."
"You can't just keep me here," I said, lifting my chin the way my father taught me, the way every Hale was raised to do when they felt small. "My family will be looking for me too."
"They're welcome to look," he said. "They won't find you here unless I want them to."
It should have scared me more than it did. Instead, the calm certainty in his voice settled something in my chest, like a hand pressed flat over a wound I had not noticed was bleeding.
He stepped closer, and I forced myself not to step back. Up close, I could see a faint scar along his jaw, and the way his gaze moved over my face like he was trying to memorize it. My breath caught in my throat. I had not felt anything but numb since I opened that storage room door, and now, standing in front of a man whose name I barely knew, I felt everything at once. My skin prickled. My pulse beat hard in my throat. Something low in my stomach pulled tight, an ache I had no name for and absolutely no business feeling tonight of all nights.
"You're shaking," he said quietly.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." He reached out, slow, like he was approaching something wild, and tucked a strand of damp hair behind my ear. His fingers barely grazed my skin, but it felt like he had touched something deeper than skin, something I did not know I had.
And then, for the first time in twenty three years, something inside me moved.
A voice. Small at first, then growing, rising up from a part of me that had always been silent, a part every healer in three packs had told me did not exist.
Mate.
I stumbled back like he had shoved me, my hand flying to my chest. "What did you just do to me?"
"I didn't do anything," he said, and from the look on his face, the shock there, I knew he felt it too. "That wasn't me."
My eyes burned. I had been told my whole life that I was wolfless, broken, unworthy of the Hale name, and now, on the worst night of my life, pregnant with another man's child, my wolf had finally woken up. For him.
I turned, desperate for air, for space, for anything to make sense of what had just happened, and my gaze landed on the wall behind him. A row of framed photographs. A family crest carved into dark wood above the fireplace, two wolves circling a broken crown.
I had seen that crest before, in old photographs my father kept locked in his study, the family he warned me and my siblings about my entire life. The family the Hales had been at war with for three generations.
"Raines," I whispered, the name turning to ice in my mouth. "You're a Raines."
The gold in his eyes flared bright, and somewhere deep in the house, a door slammed open.
- Writer
