THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

What It Costs

They fired before Wilder reached the corner.

Not guns. That was the thing Maya's brain kept snagging on afterward, in the part of her that still expected the world to make sense. There was no bang. Just a soft cough of air, four of them at once, and then Wilder went down mid-stride like something had reached out of the dark and unplugged him.

He rolled. Came up. Kept coming.

Three little metal darts stood out of his shoulder. One in his thigh. The smell hit Maya from thirty feet away, that cold wrong-metal reek, and she watched it work. Watched a man who'd torn Dane's arm half off without breathing hard start to move like he was running through wet sand.

They'd loaded silver into darts. They hadn't come to fight an Alpha.

They'd come to bring one down.

And they'd known the dose. That was the thing that turned Maya's blood to slush. Nobody works out how much silver it takes to drop an Alpha by guessing. Somebody had done this before. Somebody had practiced.

Kade hit them from the alley. He came out low and huge and already changing, and for about four seconds it was glorious, two men going off their feet, a third losing his weapon in a spray of blood, the whole street a snarl of noise.

Then somebody put three darts into Kade's back and he went over into the gutter and stayed there, twitching, his big hands opening and closing on nothing. Kade, who'd threatened to carry her to training and then let her walk past him at the door anyway. Kade, who'd told her the Alpha hadn't slept.

Wilder got to the middle of the street.

That was as far as he got.

They swarmed him. Not brave, not stupid, nothing like the movies — they were professional. Working in pairs. One drawing him around, the other putting metal into him from behind, over and over, patient as men laying brick. And he kept getting up. That was the worst part. Every time he went down he got back up slower and further from himself, and every time he did they put more silver in him, and Maya sat frozen in a truck two hundred feet away with her hands on the door and the bond in her chest screaming.

She felt it happen. Through the mark. Through the thing that tied her to him whether she'd wanted it or not.

She felt his knees hit the tarmac. Not saw. Felt. The bond handed it to her like a hand closing over her own heart, his pain arriving in her chest as if it had always belonged there, and under it, worse than the pain, the thing she'd never felt off him once: him being afraid. Not of dying. Of not getting up in time to reach her.

And something in Maya Cole came off its hinges.

The gold didn't rise this time. It broke.

It came up her spine like a wave going over a wall, and every careful thing Wilder had spent an hour teaching her about holding it back went out of her head, and she didn't press it down. For the first time since a wolf licked her knee shut in Forest Park, she opened her hands and let it come.

It hurt more than the first time. It hurt like being turned inside out.

She didn't care.

She hit the street already changing.

Some distant part of her registered the door coming off its hinges in her hand. She'd think about that later too.

Her teeth came in first, her jaw shifting under her own skin with a sound she heard from the inside. Then her hands, the claws punching out through her fingernails, long and black and right. Her spine tried to rearrange itself and only half succeeded and she went the last twenty feet on two legs and one hand like something that had never been human at all, and the sound coming out of her wasn't a scream and wasn't a howl but the thing that lives in between them.

The first man never saw her.

She took him off his feet and into the side of a parked car hard enough that the window went in, and the dart-thing in his hands clattered away across the asphalt, and Maya was moving before he'd finished sliding down the door.

The second one saw her and had time to be afraid, and she'd remember his face later, at three in the morning, for a long time.

She didn't kill him. Some thread in her, thin and stubborn and hers, held. She felt the wolf want it. Felt how easy it would be, how little there was between wanting and doing once you had a mouth built for it. She broke his arm and took his weapon and she didn't kill him, and she'd hang onto that fact in the weeks after like a woman gripping a railing.

"That's her!" Somebody was shouting it, ragged, all the confidence gone. "That's HER, that's the one he wants. Don't put her down. DON'T PUT HER DOWN—"

He wants.

Not kill her. Not she's a wolf. Don't put her down. Don't damage the merchandise.

Maya turned toward the voice with gold in her eyes and somebody else's blood on her claws and heard, dimly, under everything, a truth arriving too late.

They weren't here for the Alpha.

The Alpha was just the part they'd had to plan for.

Then the world went sideways.

Not silver. Not a dart. Something hit her in the back with the force of a car and drove her into the tarmac, and a knee came down on her spine, and hands, human hands, wrenched her arms back. She thrashed. She was strong now, stronger than she'd ever been in her life, and she got one man off her and half a scream out of another.

It didn't matter. There were six of them.

They weren't panicking, either. That was what she'd remember. They had a way of doing this. Somebody had a knee in the right place and somebody else had her wrists and somebody counted it out loud, calm as men loading a van, and Maya understood in a cold rush that they'd rehearsed taking something exactly her size.

And through the tangle of legs and the ringing in her skull, Maya saw the street sideways: Kade in the gutter, not moving. And Wilder on his knees in the middle of the road with a dozen silver darts standing out of him like quills, gold eyes still burning, still trying to get up. Still trying. Toward her.

He wasn't looking at the men.

He was looking at her.

"Don't," he said. It came out of him wrecked. "Don't touch her—"

Somebody put a boot in his chest and he went down and didn't come back up.

The street went quiet.

And in that quiet, footsteps. Unhurried. Coming up the middle of the road between the parked cars, taking his time now that all the work was done.

Dane crouched down in front of Maya where they had her pinned on the wet asphalt. His arm was in a sling from the tree line, and he'd shaved, and he smelled like cologne and nothing else at all, and he looked at her with something that was almost tender.

"There she is," he said softly. "There's my girl. I always knew you were in there."

And God help her, the sound of his voice put her right back in that apartment three years ago, small and quiet and making herself agreeable, and the wolf in her felt that flinch happen and went absolutely wild about it.

Maya snarled at him with a mouth that wasn't shaped for words.

"I know. I know." He reached out and pushed a piece of hair off her forehead with two fingers, gentle, the way he used to, and every cell in her body remembered it. "You did so well tonight, Maya. You brought him right to me. I couldn't have done it without you."

He stood, brushed off his knees, and nodded at his men.

"Bag the Alpha," Dane said. "He's worth more than all of them put together."

Two of them started dragging Wilder toward a van that had appeared at the end of the street with its lights off, and his head hung, and one gold eye was still open, still on her, and she couldn't reach him and she couldn't reach him and she couldn't reach him.

Then he looked down at her one last time, and smiled, and Maya finally understood, three years too late, with her face against the cold road and her best friend safe upstairs and the man who'd marked her lying still in the street, that Dane had never once wanted her back.

He'd wanted what she'd become.

"And bring her," he said. "Gently. She's the whole reason we're here."