THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

The Vote

"Let me live," Maya said.

The words tasted like ash. She heard them come out of her own mouth and couldn't make them feel real. That was a sentence a person got to say now, apparently. Standing in her own doorway, in her own socks, in the one apartment she'd clawed out of nothing. People said your life flashed before you when you were about to die. Nobody warned you what it did to hear a stranger read a number off it out loud, in your own kitchen, like a receipt.

"You voted," she said. "On whether I live."

Sloane stepped in.

She didn't push. She didn't have to. She just moved, easy, and Maya's feet took her backward out of the way, because every animal thing in her said do not be inside arm's reach of this woman. Then Sloane was in. In Maya's one room. And she reached back with two fingers and shut the door.

The apartment got ten degrees colder. Maya would've sworn it on anything you put in front of her.

It wasn't really a feeling. It was Sloane. The woman brought cold in with her like other people brought perfume. Maya's arms came up over her chest on their own, and every hair on them was standing straight up.

"Don't," Maya said. Back to the door now. Nowhere left to go. "Don't come in."

"Or what?" Sloane's pale eyes went around the place. The secondhand couch. The one working lamp. The takeout smell. Pricing all of it, and finding it cheap. Then she saw the napkin on the counter. Picked it up. Read it out loud, light, like it was a menu. "Run. He'll follow." She flipped it. Nothing on the back. "Who wrote this?"

"None of your business."

Which was true. It was also, she realized with a fresh drop in her gut, the honest answer. She didn't know either. She'd carried that note around in her pocket all day and had no clue whose hand had made it. That should have scared her more than it did. She was running low on room for new fears.

"Everything about you is my business now." She dropped the napkin like it bored her. "The vote was fifteen to fourteen. In case you want to know what your life's worth this week." She let that sit. "Fifteen to fourteen. Half the pack wants to put the liability down before it talks. The other half wants to see what the Alpha's pet can do."

Pet.

The word landed and just sat there in the middle of the room. She'd been called worse. Ten years of waiting tables, she'd been called plenty. But nobody had ever said it the way Sloane did, like it was simply the correct name for a thing, filed and done and true. Maya's jaw ached. She'd been grinding her teeth so hard her whole skull hurt.

Fifteen strangers had sat in a room somewhere and put their hands up about whether she got to keep breathing. Fourteen of them said no. She kept turning it over, trying to make it into a thing a person could actually hold in their hands. She couldn't. It just kept being exactly what it was.

"And you," Maya said. "Which half are you."

"I voted to keep you breathing." Sloane smiled. There was nothing behind it. Nothing at all, cold as the inside of a freezer. "For now."

"Why."

"Because I want to see what happens when Wilder breaks." She said it soft. Almost dreamy. Like it was a thing she'd wanted a long time and could finally taste. "He's held that pack together on a straight back and a shut face for years. Never a c***k. Not one. And then he goes into the woods and marks a waitress because his wolf couldn't keep it in its pants." Her eyes ran over Maya again, slow, head to foot. "You're the c***k. I've been waiting a long time for a c***k in that man.

She said it the way a woman talks about weather she ordered. Not cruel, exactly. Worse than cruel. Patient. The kind of patient that had been sharpening one plan for years and could wait a little longer for the last piece to walk itself into place."

Maya's mouth had gone dry. "You don't even know me."

"I don't need to. You're not the point." Sloane tilted her head, and for a second she looked almost kind, which was the worst thing her face had done yet. "You never were."

And there it was. Whatever Maya had told herself this was, a mistake, wrong place wrong time, a thing that could still get explained away, it wasn't. She was a piece on a board she couldn't see the edges of. She'd been one since before she ever took the shortcut.

That was when the knock came.

Not like Sloane's had been. Sloane's had been three taps, even, patient, a woman with all the time in the world. This was one knock. Just one. Hard enough to jump the frame in the door. And then nothing. A silence that held more than the sound had, like it had cost the person on the other side something not to put a fist clean through the wood.

The smell came under the door with it.

Pine. Rain.

Maya's chest did the thing again. The hook. The pull, hard enough now that she had to lock her knees to stay standing.

She was starting to hate that pull. It didn't ask. It didn't care that she was terrified, that a killer stood in her kitchen, that her whole life had come apart in two days flat. It just wanted, low and animal and sure of itself, to get to whatever was on the other side of that door.

"Wilder," Sloane said. She sounded pleased. Like a woman who'd paid for good seats. "Right on time."

She opened the door.

Wilder filled the frame. Wet through, hair dripping, jacket gone black with rain. Breathing hard, like he'd run, like he'd come the whole way on foot the second he knew where she was. His eyes were gold and blown wide. He looked less like a man who'd come to help and more like a storm that had found the right window. Rainwater ran off him onto her hallway floor. He didn't seem to notice it, or the door, or anything that wasn't her.

He didn't look at Sloane. Not once.

He looked at Maya, and his gaze went over her fast, and it took Maya a beat too long to understand what he was doing.

Throat. Wrists. Knee.

Checking. For blood. For a mark. For whatever Sloane might have done in the minutes it took him to get up those stairs.

Whatever he found, or didn't find, some of the wire went out of his shoulders. Not much. A little.

And that was its own kind of awful. Watching a man that size come down off a fraction of himself because her throat wasn't opened. It meant he'd been braced for the other thing the whole way here. It meant he'd spent the run up those stairs picturing what he might walk into.

"You're in her house," he said to Sloane. Quiet. Quiet in the way that was worse than loud.

"I'm protecting pack interests." She said it smooth and reasonable, like reading policy off a page. She even spread her hands a little. Look how helpful I'm being.

"You're in her house." The same words. The same flat quiet. But the lamp stuttered, and the air in the room pulled tight as a held breath, and the animal under Maya's own skin went dead still, the way small things go still when something big is deciding whether or not to be angry.

Maya stood pinned between the two of them with the counter at her back, and understood she was the smallest thing in the room by a distance that had nothing to do with size. Whatever they were, it filled the space over her head like weather. She made herself breathe. She'd taken the shortcut. She'd said no in a diner booth to two men who could've torn her in half. She wasn't going to fold now just because the air had grown teeth.

Sloane didn't leave. But she stopped talking, and from her, that was close to a surrender nobody would let her keep.

Then Wilder looked at Maya. Really looked this time. Not checking her for damage now. Just looking, the gold of his eyes steady on her face.

It should have been a relief. Him finally here, the pull getting the one thing it had wanted all night. It wasn't.

And something in it changed. Sharpened. Caught on something.

"Your eyes," he said.

Maya went still.

"What happened to your eyes."

Her blood went cold. All the way through. Ice in the veins.

Because she hadn't told anyone. Not Lindy. Not him. Not one living soul. The gold in the window, that one second she'd been something else in her own reflection — she hadn't breathed a word of it to anybody.

And he already knew.