THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Till Dark

Lindy's kitchen. The ugly yellow curtains. The fridge covered in magnets from places she'd never been.

And Lindy in the middle of it, taped to one of her own chairs, a thin line of red running down from her hairline into her eyebrow.

Maya had stared at the photo until the screen went black, then lit it up and stared again, and it still wouldn't stop being real. Her thumb hovered over the words like she could smudge them off the glass.

Come get her, Maya. Alone. No wolves, no Alpha, no gold eyes. You've got till dark. You know I always keep my word.

— D

He did. That was the one thing nobody in this house full of monsters understood about Dane. He kept his word. Three years ago he'd promised her she would never get away, and she'd spent every day since proving him wrong, and now here he was in Lindy's kitchen making a liar of her the easy way. Through someone she loved.

She checked the time. Just past noon. Dark came early this time of year. She had maybe six hours.

Six hours, and a list of ways to spend them that all ended with somebody dead.

Tell Wilder, and he'd bring wolves. He wouldn't be able to help it. And Dane would hear them coming a mile off, and Dane always kept his word.

Go alone, and she'd already found out about that part, in the grey hour before dawn when she couldn't sleep. She'd pulled on her shoes and gone down the stairs and out the side door into the trees, quiet, just to see. Just to know if she could.

She'd made it forty feet past the tree line before the bond dropped her.

It hadn't hurt, exactly. It was worse than hurt. It was her own body folding up under her like a puppet with the strings cut, her knees in the wet leaves, her lungs forgetting the job, a pressure behind her ribs like a hand closing slow around her heart, and one thought going white and total through all of it: back. Go back. She'd crawled the forty feet in reverse and the second she crossed the line it let her go, and she'd knelt there in the dark shaking, and understood exactly what Sloane had handed her a name for.

She'd stayed down in the leaves a long time after. Long enough to go cold. Long enough to stop being angry about it and start being afraid of what it meant. She'd spent her whole life able to leave. Any room, any job, any man who raised his voice. Walking out was the one power she'd never had to ask a soul for. And now it was gone, taken quiet in the dark by a mouth on her throat, and she hadn't even felt it leave.

A collar. She couldn't run if she wanted to. Not far. Not alone.

Which Dane could not possibly know.

Unless he did.

Maya sat on the edge of the bed that wasn't hers with the photo burning a hole in her hand, and she made herself think, cold and fast, like she used to back when thinking fast was the only thing that kept her whole. Dane said alone. No wolves. He knew what she was now. The dog, the mark, the gold. He'd stood in that yard and watched Wilder tear his arm half off to keep her. He knew she was claimed.

So he knew she couldn't come alone. Not really. The bond wouldn't let her.

He'd asked for the one thing he knew she couldn't give.

Which meant he wasn't really asking for it.

She dug in her jacket pocket, the one she hadn't taken off in three days, and her fingers found the soft worn scrap she'd been carrying since the diner. She'd told herself a dozen times to throw it out. She never had.

The napkin.

Run. He'll follow.

She'd read it as a threat that first morning. Then as a warning. Now she sat in a stranger's house with her best friend taped to a chair on a screen, and she read it a third way, and the third way turned her cold all over.

The door opened without a knock.

Wilder filled it. Still in the clothes from the council, jaw tight, and the second he saw her face the tightness dropped straight into something else. He crossed the room fast.

"What happened."

"Don't." She stood, put the bed between them out of pure instinct. "Don't come closer. I can't think when you're close, it does the thing, the pull, I can't—"

"Maya." He stopped. Went still, hands loose, like you'd go still for a spooked animal. "Tell me what happened."

She turned the phone around.

She watched him read it. Watched the exact second the man went out of his face and something older came into it, something with no give in it at all. His eyes had gone gold before he'd finished the first line.

"When," he said. Quiet. Terribly quiet.

"An hour ago. Maybe less."

"You were going to go." Not a question. He'd read it off her, off the bond, off whatever leaked between them now. "Alone. You were sitting here working out how to get past Kade and go."

"He's got Lindy, Wilder. She doesn't even know what you are. She brought me soup." Her voice cracked and she hated it. "She's in this because of me. Because I took one stupid shortcut. I'm not letting her die for it."

"You wouldn't have made it out of the trees."

"I know." She threw the napkin down on the bed between them. "I found that out this morning. I got forty feet. So don't stand there and tell me what I can't do, I've got the grass stains to prove it."

His eyes dropped to the napkin. And something crossed his face she hadn't seen there before. Not surprise.

Guilt.

Maya went very still. "You know what that is."

He didn't answer.

"Wilder. The morning after the park. At the diner. You told me not to run from you. You said next time you wouldn't be gentle. And then I found this on my napkin in handwriting I never saw get made." Her heart was going too hard. "You wrote it. Didn't you."

For a long moment the only sound was the wind in the pines outside a window that wasn't hers.

"I wrote it," he said.

"You told me not to run. Out loud. In front of your man. And then you wrote run."

"Because out loud, I'm the Alpha." His voice had gone rough, scraped down to something she'd never heard from him. "In front of Kade, in front of the pack, I'm the law, and the law had just marked a human and the law couldn't take it back. But that napkin." He stopped. Made himself say it. "That was the other thing I am. The thing that woke up in the woods when I smelled you bleeding and couldn't leave you. If it ever came down to your life or our rules, I wanted you to know. Run. And I'll follow. Anywhere. I'll always follow."

Maya couldn't look at him. She looked at the napkin instead. Three words in blue pen she'd read a hundred times and never once understood, and she thought about a man standing in a diner in front of his people, saying the hard thing out loud and hiding the true thing under a spoon. Like he'd known, even then, that she'd need it one day. Like he'd been leaving a door open for her, in the only way the Alpha was allowed to.

The room was too small. The bond was too big. And Maya stood there with her best friend on a screen and a promise on a napkin and felt something in her chest tear clean down the middle, because it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to her and it changed nothing, it saved no one, Lindy was still taped to a chair with a clock running out.

And then it hit her.

Slow. Cold. Complete.

"Say it again," she whispered.

Wilder frowned. "Maya—"

"The follow part. You'll always follow." She looked up at him, and she watched her own realization land in his gold eyes a half-second after it landed in her. "Dane knows that. Dane knows I can't come alone. He knows the second I slip out that door, you come after me. You can't not. It's the whole point of the mark." Her voice had gone flat and strange. "He didn't take Lindy to get me, Wilder."

She saw him understand it. Saw the blood go out of his face.

"He took her to get you."

The words sat in the room and neither of them moved, because there was nothing to do with them. Knowing it was a trap changed nothing. It didn't change the one fact Dane had built the whole thing on: Lindy was still in that chair, and dark was still coming, and Maya was still going to go. She'd always been going to go. Dane had known that before she did.

Somewhere out past the trees, faint and far and patient, a single wolf began to howl, and it was answered, and answered again, from the wrong direction. From the direction of the town. From the direction of Lindy's kitchen. More than one. Closing.

Wilder's head turned toward the sound like it had been nailed there.

"They're already moving," he said.