The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 2

Wren

Mari.

Nobody called her that but him. To everyone else she was Marisol Rhodes, Alpha-blooded, House Sable on her mother’s side.

She is small and she is sharp and she has been the loudest thing in every room since we were girls. Bottle-red hair down past her shoulders, green eyes she knows the exact use of, a laugh she can throw the length of a lawn. People looked at me and then went and talked to her, every time, and I never once minded it, because she was my friend. The girl who sat beside me on the registry steps when we were twelve and held my hand while the clerk wrote a word on my paper that I hadn’t said out loud since. She picked out my wedding dress. She pinned my hair herself in the back room of the church and said Adrien was the lucky one. She rang me from the car on her way in to work, every day, and told me at least once a week that I was the luckiest woman she knew, and I believed her, because I was.

Adrien was a Beta of her uncle’s House. He had married me anyway.

“That isn’t possible.” I was shaking my head and I couldn’t seem to stop. “He chose me. Do you understand what that means? I never went after him. I wouldn’t have known how.”

He understood. Everyone in this city understands.

There is an order to us and it does not bend. At the bottom, underneath all of it, are the Hollows. No wolf. No scent. Nothing on you for anybody to read. You are not registered, you do not inherit, you cannot be marked. You heal like a human heals, slowly and badly, while every other person you know closes up overnight and forgets it happened. At twelve they write UNRANKED … hollow … on your paper and hand it back to you gently and then nobody says the word out loud again for the rest of your life. My mother was one. I am one. That is the whole of it.

Above that, Deltas, who do the work. Gammas, who do the hurting. Betas, who do the arranging and the counting. Adrien is a Beta of House Sable, and a Beta marries up when he can and level when he can’t, and he does not marry a blank line on a page.

Above them the Alphas, who hold the land and the names and the money.

And then, once in a lifetime … sometimes not once in two … a Prime.

I have never met one. I don’t know anybody who has met one. There are only ever a handful breathing in the whole territory at a time, they do not come to weddings, and half of what people say about them is the sort of thing you tell a child so she’ll come in before dark.

So no. I did not go after my husband. Nobody with my paper goes after a man like Adrien. He came down the ladder and put his hand out, and I took it, and I have been grateful every day since, and every person at that wedding knew exactly how grateful I was.

Although I am not a fool, and I know what I look like. That is not a boast, it is arithmetic, and it is the only arithmetic that ever came out on my side. I am tall. I have my mother’s black hair and it goes past my waist when I don’t put it up. I have her mouth as well, and the sort of shape that makes older women at family things say oh, isn’t she, and then decline to finish the sentence. It is the one thing about me nobody has ever needed a nose to read.

So I do know what he saw across that counter. A Beta looking at a Hollow does not see a wife. He sees the best-looking woman in the building with no rank on her paper to complicate anything, and he works out that he can have her for the price of being kind to her.

I have thought about that more in the last hour than in the whole of my marriage.

“He came into the bindery for a book he didn’t need and came back for six more, and he asked me to dinner with my supervisor standing right there, and he did not have to do a single part of that,” I said. “He loves me. He is good to me. Why would he…” I couldn’t finish it. “And Mari knows what he means to me. She knows better than anyone alive. She would never hurt me like that.”

He sighed. It was a tired sound, and he looked at me with the expression people wear for someone they pity, and I hated it so much I could taste it.

“You’re too trusting,” he said. “Naive, to put that much faith in either of them.”

“If you can’t trust the people closest to you, then that sounds like a miserable way to live.”

“It is.” He said it flatly, like a fact he had checked a long time ago and never needed to check again. “It’s miserable. But loyalty is rare. Rarer than you think. I learned that the hard way.”

It was a strange thing for a mechanic to say. I didn’t know why it snagged in me, only that it belonged in the mouth of a man who had once had a great deal worth taking, not one who turned up to his own anniversary in a work coat and let his wife call him a stain.

“And you never wondered?” he asked.

“There was nothing to wonder about.”

“Six months at the very least. I would say longer.”

“Stop.” My chair scraped before I knew I was on my feet. “Whatever you have got hold of, you have got it wrong, and I am not going to sit here—”

“Sit down.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re not.”

I stopped with one hand on the strap of my bag.

It wasn’t loud. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t so much as moved his hands from the table. But the girl at the counter looked down at her own wrists as if he had spoken to her, and the man by the window stopped turning pages, and for one long second the whole shop seemed to be holding itself still for him.

I didn’t feel it. Whatever had gone through that room went around me like water around a stone, and I could not have told you why my legs folded anyway.

It had a rank on it. That much I knew. Which one, I had no idea.

I sat down.

He let out a breath, and it was the first thing he’d done that looked like it cost him.

“Six months ago,” he said. “Maybe longer. Did anything change between you and Adrien?”

I opened my mouth to say no.

I closed it.

He hadn’t touched me in months. That came first, and it was the one thing I had been careful never to look at straight on. In the beginning it was headaches. Then it was work. The contract, the closing, the deal that was always three weeks from done. He kissed my forehead and turned toward the wall, and I lay there in the dark telling myself that the kind of husband who left peonies on the counter every morning was allowed to be tired.

And that was the other thing. The work itself. Overtime that ran past midnight, whole weekends at the office, trips that lasted three days, then four, then five. He called every night from wherever he was and asked whether I had eaten. He always seemed to know when I hadn’t.

Sitting across from a stranger with my coffee gone cold, I couldn’t think of one of those trips that Marisol hadn’t been away for too. Her mother’s. A conference. A weekend with cousins in the south. She would send me a photograph of a hotel pillow with a sad face drawn on it, and I would write back that I missed her, and I had meant it every single time.

I felt the warmth go out of my face.

A woman with my paper in the registry did not ask her husband for more than he was offering. I had known that since the day on the steps. So when he said later, I said okay. When he said soon, I said of course. And I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror more than once and turned sideways, looking for whatever in me had gone wrong.

“No.” I said it out loud, and more to myself than to him. “You put that in my head. You sat me down and you put it there, and now I’m doing your work for you.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Trips are trips. Headaches are headaches. Mari has a mother.” I heard how thin it sounded and pushed on anyway. “None of that is what you’re making it.”

He didn’t argue. I think that was the worst part, that he had no need to.

He drew his phone out of the pocket of that same dark jacket and set it screen-down between us, and he left two fingers resting on the back of it.

“I can put this away,” he said. “I’ll drive you home. You can go on believing him, and it will hold for a while. Maybe a long one. Or you can turn it over.”

I looked at his hand. Big, flat, callused across the base of every finger, a line of black under one nail that no amount of scrubbing had reached. A mechanic’s hand. Marisol hated those hands. She had told me so, laughing, over wine.

He took his fingers off the phone and sat back.

I did not reach for my bag.

I turned it over.