THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Collar

"On your feet."

Two hard knocks came with it, and a voice she didn't know. Not Wilder. Not Lindy. Deep, flat, bored.

"Alpha wants you in the yard. Before the rest of them wake up and start asking why the human's still breathing."

Maya opened the door.

The wolf on the other side was built like a fridge and looked about as friendly. Broad, scarred across one forearm, dark hair shaved close. But he wasn't looking at her the way Boone had, like a problem to solve. He was just looking at her, tired, like she was one more thing on a long list of things he had to deal with before he'd earned his coffee.

"Kade," he said. "I run the Alpha's people. You do what I say when he's not around, and right now he's not around. Yard. Now."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I carry you, and neither of us wants that." A beat. Something almost human moved through his face. "He didn't sleep. Paced the whole east side of the house all night. Whatever you are to him, you're keeping him up." He turned to go. "Ten minutes. Don't make me come back."

She watched him go. Big as a truck and moving quiet, easy, like all of them moved once you knew to look for it. Two days ago she'd have called the cops on a man like that standing in her stairwell. Now he was the friendliest face in the building. Wasn't that a thing to wake up to.

The yard was grey and wet in the early light, ringed by the same firs that had watched everything since the park. Wilder was already there, shirt on this time, and the second Maya stepped out of the house she felt him. The pull, low and warm, snapping taut like a line going tight.

He turned. His eyes went over her the way they always did now. Throat. Wrists. The mark. Checking.

"You look like hell," he said.

"Your guy woke me up threatening to carry me."

"Good. He listens." He tipped his head at the open ground. "Come here. We don't have long."

They didn't. She could feel that too, in him, some tension wound tight under the calm. Something waiting.

She was learning to read him a little. Not his face. His face gave up nothing. The bond. It leaked. Right now it hummed low and braced, the feel of a man standing in a doorway, listening for a sound he already knew was coming.

He spent an hour teaching her to hold the gold back. To feel it rise, that heat up the spine, and press it down before it took her eyes. It was harder than it sounded and easier than it should have been, and every time she got it he didn't smile exactly, but something in his face eased, and she hated how much she wanted to see it ease again.

He'd step behind her sometimes, one hand flat between her shoulder blades, and say breathe, and his slow heartbeat would come up through his palm into her spine, and the gold would sink back down like water finding its level. It shouldn't have worked. It worked every time. She was starting to understand the bond didn't care what she wanted. It just kept handing her the one thing that steadied her, over and over, whether she'd asked for it or not.

"Why does it matter," she asked, breathing hard. "If they can all smell what I am anyway."

"Because control is the only thing that keeps a wolf a person." He wasn't looking at her now. He was looking at the trees. "The ones who can't hold it are the ones who slip. Get seen. Get hunted." His jaw worked. "Get us all seen."

And there it was. The thing under the calm.

"You smelled them again," she said. "The ones from last night."

"They didn't come back. Yet." He finally looked at her, and there was something almost like an apology in it. "But the pack knows now. Hunters, at our tree line, the same night I dragged a human into the house. Half of them think you're a beacon painting a target on all of us." He exhaled. "They're not entirely wrong."

He said it flat, no apology in it, and that was almost worse than if he'd tried to soften it. Half his people wanted her dead and he'd just told her so to her face, in a wet yard, before breakfast, like a weather report.

Before she could answer, a young wolf came jogging across the yard and said something low against Wilder's ear. Whatever it was, it turned him to stone.

"Council," Wilder said. "Now." He caught Maya's chin, quick, rough, the touch gone before it landed. "Stay in the house. Kade's on the door. I mean it."

Then he was gone, long strides eating the wet grass, and the pull thinned out to a thread as the distance grew, and Maya stood alone in a stranger's yard feeling more like a problem than a person.

"He's good at that," a voice said behind her. "Leaving you somewhere and calling it protection."

Maya didn't have to turn to know. There was no scent to place her by. There never was.

Sloane came around into her eyeline, unhurried, dressed like the cold couldn't touch her. Pale eyes bright with something that wasn't quite pleasure.

"You're getting good with the gold," she said. "That's fast. Faster than a human should manage. Almost like there was always a wolf in there waiting." A slow smile. "Doesn't that make you wonder what your mother didn't tell you?"

"What do you want, Sloane."

"To give you some honest advice, since nobody here will." She stepped closer. "You think last night meant something. The tree line. His forehead on yours. The pretty little bond doing its work." Her voice dropped, almost kind. "Let me save you a few weeks of hope. He didn't claim you to love you, Maya. He claimed you to keep you. There's a difference, and you're about to spend the rest of your life learning it."

"You don't know anything about—"

"I know a collar when I see one." Sloane tilted her head. "That's all the mark is. A pretty word for a leash a whole pack can smell. You can't leave now, you understand that? Not really. Walk far enough and the bond drops you to your knees. Try it sometime. He'll tell you it's for your safety, and it'll even be true, and it'll still be a collar." She let that sit. "I wanted him to have to look at it every day. So no. I didn't vote to save you. I voted so he'd have to keep you. Right up close. Where it costs him."

Maya opened her mouth to tear it apart. To tell Sloane she was wrong, that last night had been real, that the man who'd pressed his forehead to hers and shaken with relief wasn't running a leash on her.

The words didn't come.

Because somewhere under the anger, a small cold voice was already checking Sloane's math and finding it held. She couldn't leave. She'd known it since the pull first sank its hook in. Walk far enough and it would put her on her knees. Sloane hadn't told her one thing her own body didn't already know. She'd just handed it a name, and the name was ugly, and it fit.

Sloane smiled once more and walked away, and left the truth sitting in the wet grass like something dead.

Maya went inside. Past Kade at the door, who watched her but didn't stop her. Up to the room that wasn't hers. And she did the one thing she always did when the ground went out from under her.

She reached for the only person who'd never wanted anything from her.

Lindy's number rang. And rang. Went to voicemail. Hey, it's Lindy, say something interesting.

Maya tried again. Nothing.

She told herself it was early. Lindy slept like the dead, always had, six years of missed morning calls. But the cold in her ribs had spread now, up into her throat, and her hands had started doing that thing again, the shaking, the animal certainty that lived under her skin sitting up and paying attention.

She was already half-deciding to send someone, Kade, anyone, when the reasonable part of her brain caught up and stopped her cold. She couldn't. She couldn't send a wolf to Lindy's door. Lindy didn't know. Lindy still lived in the world where the worst thing in the dark was a bad date and a long walk home.

Then her phone buzzed in her hand.

A text. A number she didn't know.

She opened it.

A photo loaded, slow, one grey bar at a time. A room she half-recognized. Lindy's kitchen, the ugly yellow curtains, the fridge with the magnets. And Lindy, in the middle of it, sitting in a chair she was very much not sitting in by choice. Duct tape. Wide, wet, furious eyes. A trickle of red at her hairline.

Then the words came under it, one line, and Maya read them and stopped breathing.

You brought the dog into it. Now I've brought your friend. Come get her, Maya. Alone. No wolves, no Alpha, no gold eyes. You've got till dark. You know I always keep my word.

— D