THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Gold

Maya kept the napkin.

She'd meant to throw it out. Instead she carried it home in her jacket pocket like it might bite, and she set it on the counter under the one lamp that still worked, and she looked at it instead of sleeping.

Three words. Black pen. Handwriting she never saw get made.

Run. He'll follow.

Which was a hell of a thing to leave a girl. Seeing as the man who'd sat across from her that morning had said the exact opposite. Don't run from me again. Next time I won't be gentle. Two orders, dead against each other, and Maya couldn't tell which one was the trap.

She'd gotten through her shift somehow. Poured coffee. Dropped a plate. Watched the door every time the bell went. It never went for him. Not the yellow-eyed one, Wilder, and not the blond one in the suit either. All day, nothing. And that was almost worse, because it meant they didn't have to hurry. Whatever this was, they already knew how it ended.

Mr. Damien clocked her twice. Once when she dropped the plate, once when she stood at the pass staring at nothing for a solid minute with an order going cold under the lamp. He didn't fire her. He just said, "Go home, Cole. Whatever it is, it's not worth my coffee," and for a second she almost laughed. Or cried. Or told him a wolf had licked a hole in her leg shut two nights back. She said thanks and finished the shift instead.

The pack votes tonight.

She still didn't know what a pack vote was. Turned out there was a lot she didn't know. Like what she was. Like how a cut closes itself in ten seconds. Like why her own knee had gone smooth as a river stone. She pulled up her jeans leg and looked at it again. Nothing. She'd scrubbed it pink in the shower looking for a wound that wasn't there. Her own body, lying to her now, right along with everybody else.

Her phone buzzed. Lindy.

you alive? you were weird all day. coming up.

Not a question. That was Lindy for you. Maya barely got don't, I'm fine typed before the dots stopped and she knew her friend was already on the stairs.

Lindy came in with a plastic bag of Thai food and her hair in the messy knot she wore when she'd given up on the day. She took one look at Maya and set the bag down slow.

"Okay," Lindy said. "Who died."

"Nobody died."

"You look like you saw something."

You have no idea. What Maya said was, "I fell. In the park. Cut my knee up bad, freaked myself out. That's the whole thing."

Lindy's eyes went to the knee. To the jeans, whole and unripped. "You fell and cut your knee."

"Little cut. It's fine now."

"Maya." Lindy sat on the arm of the couch. She had that face on, the one that got Maya to admit things she didn't mean to. "Six years I've known you. You're a bad liar and a worse actor. Something happened. Just say it."

And God, she wanted to. That was the worst part. She wanted to put the whole insane night in Lindy's lap and let somebody else hold it for a minute. The wolf. The healing. MINE on the mirror. Two men in a booth talking about her like a thing to be won.

But then what. Then Lindy knew. And some cold animal part of her, the part that had gone quiet on the edge of the park two nights ago and never fully woke back up, said it plain: don't. Whatever's coming for you, don't hand it her address too.

"I'm just tired," Maya said. "Double shift. I'm bad company. I'm sorry."

Lindy was halfway through not buying it when Maya felt it.

Her knee went warm.

Not sore. Warm from the inside, right where the cut had been, like somebody set a coal against the bone. She pressed her hand flat over it without thinking. And with the warmth came something worse. A pull, low in her chest. A tug, like a hook behind her ribs, dragging her toward the window. Toward the dark. Toward the wet street three floors down.

Something was out there.

She knew it like you know a stair is there in the black, no light, no proof, your whole body just certain. Every hair up. They weren't alone in the night anymore.

She stood. Went to the window even though everything in her said don't. The street was empty and orange under the one streetlight. Nothing moved down there. Nothing she could see.

But her reflection looked back at her out of the black glass. And for one second, one single second, her eyes were gold.

Bright. Yellow. Wolf yellow.

Maya jerked back so hard she cracked her shoulder on the wall. When she looked again her eyes were her own. Brown. Ordinary. Wet and scared. But she'd seen it. She'd seen it like she'd seen the mirror. Like she'd seen the wound close. And she was done. Absolutely done telling herself she imagined things.

Because here was the part she couldn't get around, standing in her own kitchen with her heart trying to climb out of her mouth. The wolf healed her. The mirror knew her name. Two men fought over her like she was theirs to fight over. And now her own face had wolf eyes in the dark. Whatever this was, it wasn't happening to her. It was happening in her. It had been there the whole time, quiet, waiting, and something out in that park had reached in and flipped a switch.

"Maya?" Lindy was up. "You're scaring me. What is wrong with—"

"You have to go."

"What? No. You're shaking, I'm not leaving you like this—"

"Lindy." Maya picked the Thai bag back up and pushed it into her friend's hands and steered her to the door, and her voice came out flat and strange and not all the way hers. "I love you. Go home. Lock your door. Don't come back tonight. Please."

Lindy stared at her. Six years, and Maya had never talked to her like that. Not once. Whatever was on Maya's face was enough. Lindy went, slow, looking back the whole way down the hall, and Maya shut the door and threw the bolt and put her forehead on the wood and breathed.

Alone. Good. Whatever wanted her could come for her and nobody else.

The pull wasn't a tug anymore. It was a rope. Hauling. She could've pointed to it with her eyes shut. Outside. Below. A wolf in the dark, and every stupid cell she had leaned toward it like a plant leans at a window, and she hated it. She hated that her own blood wanted to go and open the door for it.

Don't run from me again, he'd said.

Maybe he was already here. Maybe the napkin was right and she was supposed to run and he'd follow, and that was the whole sick point of it.

Then somebody knocked.

Three knocks. Even. Patient.

Maya's heart went off like a car alarm. She didn't decide to move but she was moving anyway, hand finding the bolt, because the pull said go, and she was so sure. So completely sure that when she opened this door she'd be looking up into gold eyes and a wet black jacket and the smell of pine and rain.

She opened it.

It wasn't him.

A woman stood in the hall. Tall. Beautiful in a cold, built way, like something carved instead of born. Pale eyes, almost grey, that ran down Maya and back up and plainly weren't impressed by the trip. All black. And nothing on her, No scent. Not pine, not rain, not anything. Like she'd scrubbed herself clean down to the bone.

And the pull in Maya's chest didn't ease. It kept dragging, straight through the woman, out into the dark past her shoulder. Whoever she'd felt out there was still out there.

The woman smiled. It never reached her eyes.

"So," she said. "You're the human."

"Who are you." Maya's voice barely made it out.

"Sloane." She tilted her head, and for one bad second she looked at Maya exactly like the wolf had in the park. Like Maya was the strange thing. A problem with an easy answer. "The pack voted an hour ago. I thought you should hear it from someone who was in the room."

Maya's hand tightened on the door. Two nights of being marked, followed, talked about, told to run and told not to run. And something in her, the same something that took the shortcut, the same something that said no in a diner booth to two men who could've torn her in half, stood up on its back legs.

"I didn't ask for any of this," Maya said. Her voice shook. She said it anyway. "And I sure as hell didn't ask you."

Something crossed Sloane's face. Not anger. Worse. Interest. Like Maya had just gotten more inconvenient than she'd been a second ago.

"No," Sloane agreed softly. "You didn't." The smile came back, a fraction wider. "You'll be glad to know they voted to let you live."

Maya's breath went out of her, shaking.

"I didn't," Sloane said.