THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Expensive

The needle was the smallest thing in the room and it scared her more than all of it.

Dane came across the concrete with it held up, easy, like a man carrying a drink at a party. The vial in his other hand. The cooler open on the table behind him with its lid tipped back.

"Small pinch," he said.

She kept her eyes on the vial. Empty. Small. It held nothing and it was going to hold her.

"Don't."

"You've had blood taken before, Maya. You gave at that drive at the mall. I drove you."

He had. He'd waited in the parking lot and bought her a juice after. She'd thought that was love for about eleven months.

That was how he did it. Not the shouting. The juice.

He crouched. Took her arm in his hand, and his hand was warm and dry and familiar and she wanted to be sick.

Then Wilder made a sound.

She'd forgotten he could. He'd been so still so long she'd started thinking of him as furniture, as a thing in the room, as the reason all of this was happening instead of a man lying on concrete twelve feet away.

Not a growl. Nothing that big. Just a wet scrape of a laugh from the floor across the room, and it stopped Dane cold, because nothing in this room was supposed to be laughing.

"That's it?" Wilder said. His voice came out like gravel in a bucket. "That's your whole plan? A vial?"

"Shut him up," Dane said, not turning.

Nobody moved. That said everything. Two men with silver and a chained Alpha, and neither of them wanted to be the one who walked over there. There were only two men in the room besides Dane, and they'd both gone still.

"You've got forty people left in the world with this blood," Wilder said. "That's what you told her. Forty. And you're taking a vial." Another wet laugh. "You're not the buyer. You're the courier. Some man in a room somewhere told you what to bring back, and you're going to hand him a cooler and get paid, and he's going to look at what you brought and know you didn't understand it."

Dane's hand went still on Maya's arm.

"Because it's not the blood," Wilder said. "It's what makes the blood. And that's not in a vein, Dane. It's in the marrow, and it's in the change, and it's in the bond. You can't put that in a cooler." He got his head up off the concrete an inch. Gold eyes, wide open. "But you can put it in a van."

Maya's chest went tight, because she felt it come down the bond a half-second before he said it, and she knew.

Don't, she thought at him. Don't you dare.

Nothing came back. He'd shut the door on his side. He'd never done that before, not once since the park, and the silence where he'd been was worse than the room.

"Take me instead," Wilder said.

The room stopped.

Maya heard it in her own ears. The whole place going quiet at once, the way a bar goes quiet when a glass breaks.

"An Alpha. Marked, bonded, alive." He got a knee under himself. It took him a long time. "You know what your people would pay for a live bonded Alpha? You know how much of me you can take and I'll keep making more?" He was up on one knee now, chained, collared, half dead, and every man in that room was watching him like he was a fire that had started somewhere it shouldn't. "She's forty ccs and a body you have to hide. I'm a well."

"Wilder." Out loud. She didn't care. "Wilder, stop it."

Dane stood up slowly. And Maya watched a thing she'd seen a hundred times cross his face, the small greedy recalculation, the same look he got with a menu when something better was two dollars more.

That was the moment. Maya knew it because she'd watched him do it a hundred times over eleven months. Dane didn't want things. He wanted the better version of the thing he already had.

That was the whole moment, and Wilder had built it out of nothing but his own body, and Maya understood with total clarity that he was buying her something with the only currency he had left.

"Get the second van," Dane said. "And a bigger cooler."

One of the men went out. The door stayed open behind him. Maya could see a corridor. Grey walls. A light. Sixty feet, maybe, to a door with a bar across it.

A hallway.

He'd said it in her apartment, in a truck, in a wet yard. She hadn't understood he meant it literally. He'd been counting the feet.

"You're insane," she said to Wilder, and her voice cracked all the way through. "You're insane, don't do this—"

"Maya." Quiet. He didn't look at her when he said it. "Run."

And the bond went hot.

Not the pull. Not the hook. Something else, something she'd never felt, and it came up her spine and into her teeth like a hand shoving her forward. Gold blew across her vision so fast the room went white at the edges.

He was giving it to her. Whatever he had left. All of it. Straight down the thread.

She understood, in a distant way, that this was going to cost him something he didn't have.

Her wrists came off the chair.

The ties didn't cut. They tore. Straight through the silver wire and out the other side, and her hands came up in front of her face wrong and black and shaking, and there was no pain anywhere. She'd think about that later too. There was no pain anywhere at all.

She didn't decide to. The zip ties went and the silver wire went and the burn went right through her hands and she didn't care, and she was already moving, already changing, and the first man got his gun halfway up before she took him off his feet into the steel table. The vials went everywhere. Glass and blood and the cooler on its side.

Dane spun and reached for the dart gun on the table.

She hit him in the chest with her shoulder and he went into the concrete wall like a dropped bag, and she stood over him with her hands wrong and her mouth wrong and every single thing in her screaming to finish it, and she looked down at the man who'd made her small for eleven months.

He was blinking up at her. There was blood on his teeth. He didn't look afraid, and that was the thing that nearly did it, because after everything he still didn't think she'd do it.

"Maya!"

Wilder. On the floor. Chained. Not moving. And there were footsteps in the corridor now, boots, a lot of them.

She had two seconds.

She spent one of them looking at Dane's throat.

It would have been so easy. That was the part nobody tells you. It's not hard at all.

Then she was across the room with her hands in the chain at Wilder's wrists, hauling, and the metal groaned and bent and did not break, and she couldn't, she couldn't —

"Go," Wilder said.

"Shut up—" Her hands were still in the chain. She could feel the links giving somewhere and not enough, never enough, and the boots were closer now. "Shut up, I nearly have it, I nearly—"

"Maya." His forehead came down against hers, because it was the only part of him he could still move. "That's what I bought. Go."

She went.

Out the door. Down the grey corridor. Sixty feet with her lungs on fire and gold in her eyes and a sound behind her she would hear for the rest of her life, because they were putting him back down and he was letting them.

She hit the bar door with her shoulder. It didn't open so much as leave.

Cold air hit her like a slap. Trees. Rain. A gravel yard and two vans and nobody in them.

She'd been in Portland an hour ago. She had no idea where this was.

And she ran, and forty feet out she felt the bond stretch, and fifty, and sixty, and she waited for her knees to go, waited for the hand to close around her heart and put her in the dirt like it had that morning in the leaves.

It didn't.

Eighty feet. A hundred. Nothing. No hand around her heart. No knees in the leaves. Just her legs going and the rain and the dark, and a thread behind her breastbone gone slack as a dropped rope.

He'd let her go.

That was the last thing he gave her, and she was a hundred feet into the dark before she understood it, and she kept running anyway, because that was what he'd paid for.