THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Wilder

Maya didn't sleep.

She lay on top of her covers with all the lights on and her phone charging six inches from her hand, and she stared at the ceiling and waited for morning like it owed her money.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw the mirror. Three lines gouged in the glass. MINE, running down in little wet trails. She could still feel it if she thought about it too hard. That warm tongue on her knee. The wound closing under it like something out of a dream she didn't get to wake up from. And the eyes. Always the eyes. Yellow. Watching.

She told herself a hundred stories that night. None of them held.

Sleep paralysis. A dream she walked into. Some guy in a costume, some prank, some thing her tired brain built out of fear and a granola-bar dinner. But her knee was smooth. She'd checked it under the bathroom light at three in the morning. Smooth. No cut, no scar, nothing. You can't argue with a knee.

So when the bell over the diner door went at seven the next morning and she looked up and it was him, she almost dropped the coffee pot.

Tall. Black jacket. Hair wet from the Portland rain that never really stopped this time of year. He stood in the doorway a second too long, like a big dog fills a doorway, taking up more room than a person should.

And those eyes.

Not human yellow. Not tired-guy, weird-contacts yellow.

Wolf yellow.

Maya set the pot down before she dropped it. Careful. Both hands.

He didn't wait to be seated. He walked to the booth by the window, the one nobody liked because of the draft, and he slid into it like he'd picked it on purpose. He didn't look at the menu. Didn't touch it. He just looked at her, across the whole diner, steady, like he had all day and she was the only thing worth the trip.

Mr. Damien came out of the back with a tray and clocked her standing frozen behind the register.

"Table four." He nudged her elbow. "Go."

"I don't want to," Maya whispered.

"Then you're fired."

She looked at him. He wasn't kidding. He was never kidding at seven a.m. before the coffee kicked in.

So she grabbed a notepad off the counter and made her legs walk her over there. Her hands were shaking. She pressed the pad against her thigh so he wouldn't see it and she stopped at the edge of the table, close enough now to notice he took up too much of it. His knees didn't fit under. His shoulders ran wider than the booth back.

Like the wolf had been too big for the trees.

"Hi," she said. The word came out wrong, thin and high. She tried again. "Can I get you something?"

He leaned back. The vinyl creaked under him.

"Coffee. Black."

His voice was low and rough, scraped, like he didn't use it much. Like talking was something he did when he had to and not one second more.

"Anything to eat?"

"No."

A pause. She started to turn.

"Unless you're on the menu."

Her pen slipped and skated a line across the pad. "What?"

He smiled. Not a nice smile. Sharp. There and gone.

"Nothing," he said. "Coffee's fine."

She got out of there. Walked fast to the kitchen, pushed through the swinging door, and stood against the steel counter with her eyes shut for a count of ten. Just breathing. The line cook glanced at her and went back to his eggs. Ten seconds. That was all she let herself have. Then she poured the coffee, black, and made herself carry it back out with a steady hand because she'd be damned if she let him see it shake twice.

When she came back he wasn't looking at her. He was watching the door. Whole body still, but pointed at it, like you watch a road when you know something's coming down.

She set the mug in front of him. He wrapped one hand around it and didn't drink.

He looked at her knee.

Right at it. At the spot under the ripped-and-somehow-not-ripped denim. The spot that should have had a scab and a bruise and a story. The spot that had nothing.

"It healed," he said.

Not a question.

Maya went still. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes you do." He finally looked up from the mug, and those eyes hit her full on. "Maya."

She hadn't told him her name.

Not on a nametag. She didn't wear one. Not to Mr. Damien, not out loud, not anywhere this man could have heard it. She ran back through every second of last night and came up empty. He just had it. Her name, in that rough voice, like he'd owned it a while.

She was still working through that, still standing there with her mouth half open, when the bell over the door jingled again.

Another man walked in. And the whole room changed.

This one was different. Blond, where the first was dark. A suit that fit him like suits fit people who own more than one. He smelled expensive even from here, even through the diner's fog of grease and burnt coffee, something clean and sharp cutting across all of it.

He didn't wait to be seated either. He crossed the floor and sat down across from Yellow Eyes without asking, sliding into the booth like he had a right to it.

"You're late," the blond one said.

"She was late." Yellow Eyes said it without looking away from Maya. "Wilder."

Wilder.

That was his name. It landed in her chest and stuck there.

The blond one sighed, put-upon, like this was all beneath him. "Marlowe."

Then he looked at Maya. Cold. Head to foot, quick, assessing. Like you'd look at a stain on the carpet you were deciding whether to replace.

"So this is her," Marlowe said. "The human."

Maya's stomach dropped. "I'm not—"

"You are." Wilder cut her off flat. "Marked."

He said it like a fact. Like weather. Like something he already owned and didn't need her to confirm.

Marlowe laughed. One short, sharp sound with no humor in it.

"An unwilling mate," he said. "How novel." A short pause. "They never stay unwilling, though. Not once the moon does its work."

Then he turned the full weight of his attention on Maya, and his voice changed. Smoother. Almost kind. That was somehow worse.

"Come with me," Marlowe said. "I can get you out of this. Right now, tonight, before he decides to claim you for real. You have no idea what that means yet. Trust me. You don't want to find out."

Wilder's jaw ticked. Just once, a muscle jumping under the skin.

The lights over the table flickered. Buzzed. Went bright, then low, then steady again.

Maya felt it before she understood it. Something coming off both of them, filling the little booth, pushing at the air like heat off a stove. Two big quiet men, and the fluorescents couldn't handle whatever was in the room with them. Her skin didn't like it. Every part of her wanted to be somewhere else.

Maya looked between them. Two men in a diner booth talking about her like she was a thing to be won, or moved, or claimed, and neither one of them had once asked her a single question.

"I'm not going anywhere with either of you," she said.

She hated how small it came out. She said it anyway.

"Good," Wilder said. He still hadn't looked at Marlowe. "Because you're not his."

Not his. Like that settled it. Like the only two choices on the table were his or Marlowe's, and nobody in this booth had thought to write down a third.

Marlowe stood. Buttoned his jacket, unhurried, like he'd gotten what he came for.

"This isn't over," he said. "The pack votes tonight."

He dropped a twenty on the table, didn't wait for change, and walked out into the rain.

The diner went quiet behind him. A fork scraped a plate somewhere. The coffee machine hissed. Ordinary sounds that felt like they belonged to a different morning.

Wilder stood too. He left his coffee where it was, full, untouched, still steaming. He came around the table, and before he went he stopped beside her, close, closer than he needed to be.

Close enough that she caught it again.

Pine. And rain. The same as last night, under the trees, right before the world stopped making sense.

"Don't run from me again," he said. Quiet. Almost gentle. That was the trick of it. "Next time I won't be gentle."

Then he was gone too, out the door, into the grey, and the bell swung on its hook long after it should have stopped.

Maya stood there. Her heart was going too hard again. She made herself breathe. Made herself start clearing the table because that was a thing her hands knew how to do when the rest of her didn't.

She picked up the full mug. The twenty. The napkin.

And she stopped.

On the napkin, in black pen, in handwriting she had not seen anyone write, three words waited for her.

Run. He'll follow.