THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Quorum

They brought Kade back in the bed of a truck with two coats over him and four silver darts still in his back, and the pack house came apart.

Boone got there first. He hauled the tailgate down and took one look and his face went a colour Sloane had never seen on him, and then he was shouting, and then everybody was, thirty wolves in a wet yard at midnight all talking at once and nobody saying anything.

Sloane stood on the porch steps with her arms crossed and watched.

She counted. It was what she did while other people shouted. Kade breathing, but not waking. No Alpha. No Alpha's truck. No Alpha's scent on the wind for the first time in eleven years, because the bond that hummed under every wolf in this pack, the low constant fact of him, had gone thin as a thread and cold as a stone.

Every wolf in that yard could feel it. That was why they were shouting. Take the roof off a house at midnight and everybody inside starts making noise. It isn't grief yet. It's just cold coming in.

"They took him," Boone said, to no one, to everyone. "They took him. Silver. Silver, in the middle of a street, in the city." His voice cracked. He was seventy years old and had buried more people than most of them had met. "This is Blackpine. This is Blackpine happening again, right now, and I told you."

"You did," Sloane said.

The yard went quiet. Boone turned on her, all teeth.

"Don't."

"I'm agreeing with you." She came down one step. "You said a human mate ends in graves. Four days later, an Alpha's in a van and Kade's in a truck bed." She spread her hands. "I'm not gloating, Boone. I'm counting."

That did it. That was the sentence that broke the yard open, and Sloane watched it happen like she'd watched everything for eleven years. From one step up, arms crossed, doing the arithmetic.

Because here was the arithmetic. Wilder gone. Kade down. Thirty wolves and no head. A pack without an Alpha for more than a day starts to come apart at the seams, and every wolf in this yard could feel that too, that low sick fraying, and by dawn some of them would start looking around for someone to stand at the front.

She had spent her whole life being raised for exactly this. Her mother had told her at nine years old what she'd be. Eleven years standing at that man's shoulder, learning the pack from the inside, keeping her scent so clean nobody ever knew what she was feeling. All of it for a night that had finally arrived, uninvited, wearing somebody else's disaster.

And it had come to her exactly as she'd wanted it. Not by killing anyone. Not by lifting a hand. She'd simply stood still and let a stupid man make a stupid choice over a human girl, and the whole thing had fallen into her lap like fruit off a tree.

Sloane waited to feel it. The thing she'd been promised she'd feel.

It didn't come.

What came instead was a picture she couldn't get rid of: Wilder on his knees in a wet street with a dozen darts in him, still trying to get up. Not for the pack. For a waitress.

Eleven years he'd never once looked at Sloane like that. Not once. And she'd wanted him to break, she'd said it out loud in a mountain kitchen and meant every word, and now he'd broken all the way and it turned out there was no pleasure in it at all. There was just a hole in the middle of her pack where a man used to be.

The elders arrived at three in the morning.

Not a summons. Not a messenger. The five of them simply came, like weather comes, and the yard emptied ahead of them like water off a road. Odette walked in front with a stick she didn't need and her white hair pulled back hard.

She looked at Kade a long moment. She put two fingers against his throat, and closed her eyes, and left them closed while everyone watched.

"He'll live," Odette said. "He'll wish he hadn't, for a month." She straightened up. "Where's my Alpha."

"Gone," Boone said. "Hunters. Silver. They took him off a street in the middle of—"

"I know where. I want to know why."

Nobody answered.

"I'll tell you why," Odette said, "since we've all got such careful mouths tonight. Four days ago I stood in a stone room and I told a girl with gold eyes that if she brought hunters to our door, we would end her. Do you remember? She remembers. I watched her decide to be brave about it." She turned in a slow circle, and every wolf that pale grey gaze touched found something else to look at. "Well. The hunters have come. They didn't come to our door, they came to our Alpha, and they took him off a public street with silver they knew the dose of." She let that sit. "So. Quorum."

The word went through the yard like a knife going into a table.

"On what," Sloane said.

"On the human." Odette's eyes found her. "On whether we spend this pack's last strength going into a hunter's box after an Alpha who may already be dead. Or whether we cut her loose, which is what the law says, and always said, and would have said four days ago if he'd had the sense to listen." She lifted her chin. "The law is not cruelty, girl. The law is what's left of us after the last time. Blackpine took four hundred wolves. Four hundred. I dug some of them out myself."

"And if we cut her loose," Boone said slowly, "and they get what they want out of her."

"Then they get it," said Odette. "And we're still here."

And the terrible thing, Sloane thought, was that the old woman wasn't wrong. That was how she'd kept them alive for ninety years. You cut the arm off to save the body, and you do it fast, and you do it before the body votes.

And Sloane stood on the steps and understood that it was hers. Right now. All she had to do was nothing. One shrug. One the old woman's right. The pack would follow her by breakfast, and the girl would be a story they told for a generation, and Wilder would be a name on a stone, and she would never once have to look at what he'd chosen over her, ever again.

She opened her mouth.

"No," Sloane said.

Odette turned. Every wolf in the yard turned.

Sloane looked at her own hands, which was easier than looking at any of them, and heard herself say the most expensive sentence of her life.

"They didn't take Wilder because he marked a human," she said. "Think. They had a whole crew on a city block. Silver, dosed for an Alpha, a van, a route. That's months of work. That's money. You don't spend that on a mistake." She looked up. "You spend it on a prize. Nobody in this yard is asking the only question that matters, so I'll ask it. What is that girl actually worth, that men like this would build a machine to get her?"

Silence.

"And if she's worth that much to them," Sloane went on, and God, she could feel her own crown sliding right off her head as she said it, "then she's worth that much to whoever holds her. Cut her loose and we don't get to be safe. We get to be the pack that handed the hunters a weapon and then waited to find out what it does." She shrugged. "Vote how you like. I've said it."

Odette looked at her for a long, long moment.

"Well," the old woman said at last. Something almost warm went through her face and was gone. "There's a Luna in there after all."

"Don't," Sloane said. "I hate her."

"Yes," Odette agreed. "That's rather the point of duty."

Fifty miles east, in a room with a drain in the floor, Maya watched Wilder's fingers curl against the concrete.

Don't move, she thought, hard, throwing it down the bond like a stone into a well. Don't you dare move, he's got twelve men and you can't even stand—

And the bond, thin and cold and half dead, brought something back.

Not words. Wilder didn't have words left. What came up the thread was worse: a flat, calm, absolutely settled certainty, and under it, an image. Her. Out the door. Down the corridor. Gone.

He wasn't going to fight his way out.

He was going to make himself expensive enough to buy her a hallway.

"Wilder," Maya said out loud, and her voice broke, "don't—"

Dane heard her. Dane, who had been reaching for the cooler on the table, turned around with a mild, interested look on his face, saw a chained Alpha with open gold eyes, and smiled like a man watching a good idea arrive.

"Oh, he's awake," Dane said. "Excellent. He should see this part."

He picked up the first vial and came toward her.