THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Everything He Wanted

The truck smelled like wet dog and gun oil.

Kade drove. Wilder rode up front with his jaw set and his hands flat on his knees, and Maya sat in the back between two wolves she'd never been introduced to, both of them big enough to block a doorway, neither of them looking at her.

Nobody talked for the first ten minutes. The wipers went. The heater rattled. Portland slid past the windows in the last grey of the afternoon, ordinary as anything. A man walking a dog. A kid on a scooter. A woman arguing into her phone outside a Thai place. Maya watched a whole city of people who got to spend today being people. Four days ago she'd been one of them. Four days ago the worst thing in her life was rent. She wanted to put the window down and yell at the woman on the phone that she had no idea, none, how good she had it, standing on a wet sidewalk arguing about nothing while her whole ordinary life just went on happening around her.

Four hours till dark.

"Say it again," Wilder said, without turning around.

Maya closed her eyes. "Kade goes in first from the alley. You take the front. I stay in the truck until one of you says otherwise."

"And?"

"And if it goes wrong, I run for the tree line at Marshall Park and you find me there." She opened her eyes. "It's a stupid plan."

"It's the only plan."

"He's expecting you," she said. "That's the whole point. Every part of this is built to get you through that door."

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because your friend is in that chair." He said it flat, still not turning. "And because there's no version of tonight where I let you walk in there without me, and he knows that too. So we both know what this is." A pause. "He built a box. We're getting in it. The only thing left to decide is what we do once the lid's shut."

Kade snorted quietly. "Real inspiring, boss."

"Drive."

Kade drove. But he caught Maya's eye in the mirror for half a second, and she got the message in it plain enough: he knows it's a trap, he's going anyway, and he's going because of you. It wasn't an accusation. That was somehow worse. Kade had known Wilder his whole life and he was looking at her like a man watching weather come in over a house he'd helped build.

Maya looked down at her own hands. She'd been doing the thing Wilder taught her all afternoon, feeling the gold rise and pressing it back down, and it kept slipping now, flaring up her spine every time she pictured those yellow curtains. She didn't fight it as hard as she should have.

She wasn't sure, anymore, that she wanted to.

That was the part she'd think about later. Four days ago a raised voice in a diner made her flinch. Now there was something in her chest that wanted the dark to hurry up, and wanted Dane to be there when it came, and it had teeth, and it wasn't afraid of him at all.

Lindy's building was the same as it had always been. Four floors of tired brick on a street with too many parked cars, a buzzer panel with half the names rubbed out. Maya had climbed those stairs a hundred times with a bottle of wine and takeout and six years of complaints. It looked exactly like it always looked.

Except it was too quiet.

Even Maya could feel it, and she'd been a wolf for all of three days. No music. No TV. Nobody's dog. A whole building holding its breath.

There was a bike chained to the rail outside that had been there since March. Somebody's recycling out on the step. It was all so exactly the same that Maya's brain kept trying to hand her the ordinary version of this night, the one where she ran up those stairs two at a time and Lindy opened the door with a bottle of wine and told her she looked like hell.

"Wrong," Kade said, low. He'd gone very still in the driver's seat, head tilted, nostrils working. "Boss. It's wrong."

"How wrong."

"There's no scent." Kade's hands flexed on the wheel. "Not a bad scent. No scent. Whole block's been wiped. That's not a man with a hostage. That's a crew that knows exactly what we are."

The bond went tight in Maya's chest, and she felt what came off Wilder then, and it wasn't fear. It was something colder and older, a thing settling down onto its haunches.

"Stay in the truck," he said.

"Wilder—"

"Maya." He turned around then, and his eyes were already gold. "For one hour, do what I ask. One hour. Then I'll never ask again."

And because he said it like that, because he'd written run and I'll follow on a napkin and hidden it under a spoon, she nodded.

He was gone into the grey before she could change her mind. Kade went the other way, into the alley, and the two big wolves peeled off up the block, and Maya sat alone in a truck that smelled like wet dog and gun oil and watched her best friend's window.

Third floor. Yellow curtains. A light on behind them.

One minute. Two.

Then the curtains moved.

And Lindy was standing in the window.

Standing. Not taped to a chair. Not bleeding. Standing there with her arms crossed, looking down at the street, at the truck, right at Maya. Her hair was up in the messy knot she wore when she'd given up on the day. She looked bored.

She looked fine.

Maya's whole body went cold at once, and the gold came up her spine so fast it whited out the edges of her vision, and one thought landed in the middle of her mind with the weight of a dropped stone.

The photo was old.

She'd seen that kitchen a thousand times. The magnets. The curtains. Lindy taped to a chair with blood at her hairline. Dane hadn't taken her tonight. He'd taken her sometime. Long enough ago to let her go. Long enough ago to make a photograph.

Long enough ago to build the rest of it.

Maya's hands had gone numb around the phone. He'd let Lindy walk home. He'd let her wash the blood off her forehead and go to bed and get up and make coffee, and the whole time that photo had been sitting in his pocket like a loaded gun, waiting for the day he needed Maya to run somewhere. He hadn't taken a hostage.

He'd taken a photograph.

Maya was already reaching for the door handle when her phone buzzed in her lap.

Look at her, Maya. Doesn't she look good? I only needed her for twenty minutes. She doesn't even remember it. But you came running anyway, didn't you. And you brought me exactly what I asked for.

Look up.

She looked up.

The streetlights went out.

The whole block, at once, all four floors and both ends of the street, dropping into a dark so total that for one second Maya couldn't tell if her eyes had failed. Then the gold came up and the world turned silver-grey and sharp, and she saw them.

Men. On the roofs. In the alley mouth. Coming out of parked cars up and down the street with the unhurried confidence of people who'd been sitting there for hours. Eight of them. Ten. More.

Not wolves.

Humans. Every one of them, and every one of them holding something, and the things they were holding threw off a smell she'd never known she could smell until right now. A sharp, cold, wrong-metal reek that made the animal under her skin scream.

Silver.

She'd never seen it in her life and her body knew it anyway. Knew it the way you know a stove is hot without touching it. Every cell she had wanted to be somewhere else, and under that, quieter and much worse, was the understanding of what those men were holding it for.

Down the street, past the alley mouth, a shape came around the corner of Lindy's building at a dead run. Wilder. Coming back for her, fast, terrifyingly fast, half a block covered before she'd finished drawing breath.

And every single one of those men turned to face him at once.

Not one of them had looked at Maya. Not one.

And that was when she finally understood the whole shape of it, all the way down. Dane hadn't needed to keep Lindy. Dane hadn't needed to touch Maya at all. He'd just needed to know one thing about her, the same thing he'd always known, the thing he'd built three years of her life on: that Maya Cole would come for the people she loved.

He'd used the best part of her as the bait.

Her phone buzzed again in her frozen hand.

Told you I always keep my word. I said come alone.

You brought me an Alpha.