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. 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, and a laugh she can throw the length of a lawn. People looked at me, then went and talked to her, every time. Did I mind? Not once, because she was my friend.

She was the girl who waited for me on the registry steps when we were twelve. She held my hand all the way down them. The clerk had just written a word on my paper… a word 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 called me from the car on her way in to work, every day. At least once a week she told me I was the luckiest woman she knew. And I believed her. Why wouldn’t I? I was. Adrien was a Beta of her uncle’s House. He’d 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.

And let me tell you, Hollow paper gets you exactly nowhere. You can’t register a marriage in your own name. You don’t inherit. You can’t be marked. You heal like a human heals, slowly and badly. Every other person you know closes up overnight and forgets it happened.

At twelve they write UNRANKED on your paper and hand it back to you gently. Hollow… that’s what it means. Then nobody says the word out loud again for the rest of your life. My mother was one. So was I.

Above that, Deltas, who do the work. Gammas, who do the hurting. Betas, who do the arranging and the counting. Adrien was Sable’s. 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 the Betas sit the Alphas, who hold the land and the names and the money.

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

I’ve never met one. I don’t know anybody who has. There are only ever a handful breathing in the whole territory at a time. They don’t come to weddings. Half of what people say about them is what you tell a child so she’ll come in before dark.

Over all of it sits the Sovereign of the Accord, one at a time, for life. To somebody with my paper he is a seal at the bottom of a page.

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. I’d been grateful every day since. Every person at that wedding knew exactly how grateful I was.

I wasn’t a fool, though. I knew what I looked like. That isn’t a boast. It’s math. It was the only math that ever came out on my side, and nobody had ever needed a nose to read it.

So what had he seen across that counter? I knew. A Beta looking at a Hollow doesn’t see a wife. He sees the best-looking woman in the building, with no rank on her paper to complicate anything. Then he works out that he can have her for the price of being kind to her.

In all the years of my marriage I’d never once let myself do that sum. Now I was doing it across a coffee shop table from my best friend’s husband. Great. Fantastic.

“He came into the bindery for a book he didn’t need. Then he came back for six more. He asked me to dinner with my supervisor standing right there.” I heard my voice climb. “He did not have to do a single part of that. He loves me. He is good to me. Why would he…” I couldn’t finish it. I swallowed and tried again. “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. He gave me the look people give somebody 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.”

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

“It is.” He said it flatly, like a fact he’d 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. Why did it snag in me? I didn’t know. I only knew it belonged in the mouth of a man who’d once had a great deal worth taking. Not a man 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’d say longer.”

“Stop.” My chair scraped before I knew I was on my feet. “Whatever you’ve gotten hold of, you’ve got it wrong, and I’m 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, and he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t so much as lifted his hands from the table. But the girl at the counter looked down at her own wrists, as if he’d spoken to her. The man by the window stopped turning pages. For the space of a breath, the whole shop held itself still for him.

I didn’t feel it. Whatever had gone through that room went around me like water around a stone. So why did my legs fold anyway? I couldn’t have told you. 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’d been careful never to look at straight on. Don’t look at it now, Wren. Don’t you dare.

I looked.

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 it was fine. A husband who left peonies on the counter every morning was allowed to be tired. Wasn’t he?

And that was the other thing. The work itself. Overtime that ran past midnight and whole weekends at the office. Trips that started at a couple of nights and kept getting longer. He called every night from wherever he was and asked whether I’d eaten. Somehow he always knew when I hadn’t.

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

The warmth went out of my face. I felt sick.

A woman with my paper in the registry didn’t ask her husband for more than he was offering. I’d known that since the day on the steps. So when he said later, I said okay. When he said soon, I said of course. More than once I’d stood sideways at the bathroom mirror… looking for whatever in me had gone wrong.

“No.” I said it out loud, more to myself than to him. I was furious with him. Furious was so much easier than the other thing. “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. I pushed on anyway. “None of that is what you’re making it.”

He didn’t argue. That was the worst part, that he didn’t need to. He drew his phone out of the pocket of that same dark jacket and set it screen-down between us. 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. It was big and flat, callused across the base of every finger. There was a line of black under one nail that no amount of scrubbing had reached. A mechanic’s hand. Marisol hated those hands. She’d told me so, laughing, over wine. I didn’t hate them. Why was I even thinking about his hands right now?

He took his fingers off the phone and sat back. I did not reach for my bag.

I turned it over.