Rejected By My Alpha, Claimed By The Lycan

JOSIE'S POV I spent three years of bakery profits on a pocket watch for a man who wanted me dead. I didn't know that yet. On the night before our third anniversary, I was standing in the lodge parking lot in Duluth, Minnesota, with the gift box tucked inside my coat, snow stinging my face, and a stupid, hopeful smile I couldn't seem to wipe off. The watch was antique silver, engraved on the back with our wedding date and the words Always yours. It had cost me every extra dollar I'd saved from selling sourdough and cinnamon rolls at six a.m. to hungover tourists. I didn't care. Grant had been so distant lately, and I had decided, the way women do when they're tired of being afraid, that love was a thing you could repair if you simply tried harder. “He's under pressure,” I told myself. “Alpha of Northwind Pack. Everyone leans on him.” “He grabbed your arm last month hard enough to leave fingerprints,” whispered my wolf, Sage. “He's been cold for half a year. Stop making excuses for him.” I ignored her. I always ignored her. It's easier to ignore the truth when it's a small voice inside your own chest. Grant had sent me to pick up our anniversary cake from a bakery two hours away and told me not to hurry back. Then the first snow squall rolled in, the roads turned to glass, and I decided to turn around early. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to be in our kitchen with a glass of wine when he got home. The pack lodge was quiet. Everyone had gone down to the lake house for the weekend, everyone except my husband, who had supposedly stayed behind to catch up on paperwork. A line of light glowed beneath the door of his study. I heard a woman's voice first, throaty and amused. "You could at least pretend to be nervous." "Why would I be nervous?" Grant said. "She trusts me. She's so busy trying to deserve me she never asks a single question." I stopped in the hallway with my hand flat against the wall. I knew that other voice. I'd grown up with it. Brooke Delaney had been my stepsister since I was eleven, the girl who braided my hair before my first school dance, who stood next to me at my wedding in a sage-green dress and cried real tears when we said our vows. The door was open an inch. I looked through it. Brooke was perched on the edge of my husband's desk with her legs wrapped around his waist, her blond hair loose, his hands on her bare thighs. They were kissing like people who'd done it a hundred times before. My knees nearly gave out. "Calder land goes to the pack the moment her father signs the trust over in January," Grant murmured against her throat. "Four thousand acres of timber and the whole river frontage. All I have to do is keep her docile until then." "And after?" "After, there's a tragic accident." He sounded bored. "Icy road, maybe. Or the lake. She's always been clumsy near water. Nobody will question a grieving husband." "You're awful," Brooke said, and giggled. I made a sound. I don't know what kind. A little broken exhale, hardly a sound at all. The gift box slipped from my coat and hit the hardwood floor, the lid bursting open. The pocket watch skidded across the boards and stopped against the toe of Grant's boot, ticking cheerfully. Both of them turned. I watched my husband's face go through three expressions: shock, calculation, and finally something flat and cold that I recognized from the nights I'd learned to wear long sleeves in July. "Josie." He stepped away from the desk, zipping his jeans like it was an afterthought. "You're home early." "You said accident." My voice didn't sound like mine. "You said lake." "You misheard." "Brooke—" My stepsister slid off the desk and wouldn't meet my eyes. "It wasn't supposed to be like this." That was all. That was the whole apology. I ran. Behind me I heard Grant's chair crash over, then his voice, low and furious, rolling down the corridor. "Josephine. Stop." My feet stumbled. It was the strangest thing, like invisible fingers wrapping around my spine. He'd used the Alpha voice on me before, in small ways, and I'd always thought of it as a quirk of his authority. Now I understood it was a leash. Don't you dare, Sage snarled, and the pull snapped loose just enough for me to reach my car. I drove into the storm with no destination, my hands shaking on the wheel. Twenty minutes later my phone lit up on the passenger seat. Grant: Come home. We'll talk about this like adults. Grant: You walk away, your father loses everything. The trust binds him, not me. Grant: I'm not asking, Josie. I pulled over and threw the phone into a snowbank. Then I took off my wedding ring and flung it after the phone, and I sat there with the engine running and the wipers beating back the snow, laughing and sobbing in a way that frightened me. I made it another ten miles before the highway patrol closed I-35 at a roadblock. A trooper with kind eyes waved me toward an exit. "There's a roadhouse up the road, ma'am. The Antler Inn. It's the only thing open between here and Hinckley. You shouldn't be out in this." The Antler Inn was a log building with a buzzing neon sign and a half-dead Christmas wreath on the door. Inside, a woodstove roared and a jukebox murmured something old and country. I dropped onto a barstool and ordered bourbon, and then I started to cry into it as quietly as I could. That was a skill I had perfected. "That's a lot of bourbon for a Wednesday." The voice came from the stool beside mine. It was low, a little rough, like smoke curling over stone. I looked up, and the room tilted. He was the kind of man who made you glance twice, and then glance away, because he looked like trouble that knew your name. Black hair, too long, damp with melted snow. A face carved with a hard, patient hand. Eyes the color of a winter sky about to break. Sage, who had hidden in the back of my mind for months, stood up. Oh, she breathed. Oh, Josie. Look. "Bad night?" he asked. "The worst of my life." "Tell me." He nodded at the bartender for two more glasses. "I'm not going anywhere. The roads are closed." I should have said nothing. I should have kept my mouth shut and my pride intact. But I was empty and I was drunk, and he was looking at me like I mattered, so I told him everything. The watch. The study. An accident. The lake. When I finished, his face had gone very still. The kind of stillness that has a temperature. "He said that," he said quietly. "Those words." "Those words." He set down his glass with great care, as if he didn't trust his hands. "And you drove into a blizzard." "What else was I supposed to do?" "Feel something other than hurt." He turned toward me, and his knee pressed mine, and a current ran up my leg. "What do you want, Josie? Not what's smart. Not what's right. What do you want tonight?" I had spent twenty-six years being good. Where had it gotten me? "I want to be chosen," I whispered. "Just once. I want somebody to look at me and choose me." His eyes dropped to my mouth, and the gray in them went dark as thunder. "Then you've been looking at the wrong men," he said. "Because I decided the moment you sat down."