THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Nine Hours Early

Sloane made the call at eleven forty.

Maya stood close enough to hear both sides. Marlowe picked up on the second ring, which told her he'd been sitting with the phone in his hand, which told her everything about how sure he'd been.

"Acting Alpha," he said. "You're early."

"We take the deal."

"Say the whole thing."

Sloane's jaw went tight. And Maya stood in a cold hall and watched a woman who'd waited eleven years for a crown spend the whole thing in one sentence, out loud, into a phone, in front of thirty people who'd remember it.

"Cascade signs the compact," Sloane said. "Wilder steps down. Your man sits at our table. We take the deal."

There was a pause on the line that was almost decent.

"You know," Marlowe said, "I expected that to be more enjoyable."

"Send the layout."

"Sending." Somewhere expensive, a keyboard clicked. "Sloane. One thing, free, because I'm feeling strange about all this. Crane doesn't lose. If you go in there and he works out he can't keep what he's bought, he'll break it before he lets you have it." A beat. "Go fast."

He hung up. Thirty phones lit up at once with a floor plan.

Maya watched Sloane stand there holding a dead phone for about two seconds longer than she needed to.

"Sloane—"

"Don't." She put the phone in her pocket. "Don't you dare thank me. I'd have done it for any wolf in this yard."

Which was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, and Sloane walked off toward the trucks before Maya could say so.

They went nine hours early, and that was Maya's doing. She'd stood in that hall and said the moon was coming, and every hour they spent checking vests was an hour Wilder spent holding a rope with his teeth. Nobody argued. She wasn't sure whether that meant she'd made a good case or they'd all just stopped caring whether they came home.

Boone drove.

Kade came, which he had no business doing. He'd woken that afternoon, put his boots on, walked out to the truck and stood there looking at Sloane until she gave up and opened the door. He couldn't lift his left arm. He came anyway.

"You shouldn't be here," Maya told him.

"Neither should you." He shut his eyes. "Shut up. I'm sleeping."

He didn't sleep. She watched him not sleep for forty miles. Every bump in that road went through his ribs and he took it with his eyes shut and his jaw set, and not once did he make a sound.

She'd known these people six days. Six. She kept waiting to feel like a stranger in that truck and it kept not happening, and she didn't know what to do about that either.

The place was a feed mill on a service road with no name.

Nothing about it looked like anything. Grey buildings. A silo. A chain fence with a sagging gate. Sodium lights buzzing over a yard with two vans and a flatbed in it, and a sign for a company that hadn't existed since 2011.

It looked like the fifty other dead industrial lots between here and Portland. Maya sat in the dark truck with her heart in her throat and understood exactly why nobody had ever found these people.

You don't hide monsters in a castle. You hide them somewhere so boring nobody looks twice.

There was a Coke machine outside the office door. That was what got her. A Coke machine, lit up, humming away at one in the morning for nobody. Somebody in that building bought a Coke on their break. Somebody worked a shift here and went home and had a life.

The bond had gone strange over the last twenty miles. Not stronger. Nearer. Like a sound you feel in the floor before you hear it.

He was in there. Somewhere in all that grey nothing, he was in there.

Maya put her hand flat on her own sternum and pressed, hard, like you'd press a bruise to check it was real.

Two days ago she'd have said the bond was the worst thing that ever happened to her. A collar. Sloane's word, and it had fit. Now it was the only reason she knew he was still breathing, and she didn't have the first idea what to do with that.

"Three on the fence," Kade said quietly. He hadn't opened his eyes. "One on the roof. There should be six."

Sloane lowered the binoculars. "Say that again."

"Marlowe's sheet says six outside at night. I count four."

"Two could be inside."

"Could be." Kade opened his eyes. "Or four's what you leave behind when you've already moved the thing everybody's coming for."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Somewhere out past the fence a sodium light buzzed and buzzed.

"We go," Maya said.

"It's wrong," Boone said. "Kade's right and you know he is. Four instead of six means something."

"It means something." Maya was already reaching for the door handle. "It doesn't mean we go home."

Sloane looked at her a long moment. Then she got out of the truck.

It went well.

That was the thing. That was the thing that had the back of Maya's neck crawling the whole way in, because for eleven minutes it went beautifully.

The fence came down where Marlowe said it would. Two of Boone's people took the roof man without a sound Maya could hear even now, with these ears. The side door had the lock Marlowe promised and Sloane went through it like it was made of paper.

No alarm. No shouting. No dogs.

Just wolves moving through a dark building in a line, and Maya in the middle of them with her hands aching to change and the mark on her throat pulling her forward like a needle finding north.

She'd never done anything like this in her life. She'd never so much as been in a fight before last week. And she moved through that building without one wrong step, because the thing under her skin knew exactly how, and had always known, and was very glad to finally be asked.

Corridor. Left. Down.

She knew these walls. That was the horror of it. Grey block, one strip light out of three working, sixty feet to a door with a bar across it. She'd run this hallway barefoot two nights ago with everything he had left burning in her chest.

She'd counted it at sixty feet that night. It was fifty-two. She'd remember that too, later, when she had time to think about how much a person can get wrong while they're running for their life.

"There," she said. "That door."

Sloane put her shoulder into it and the room opened up.

The chair was still there. Bolted down, tipped on its side, the ties still hanging off the arms in two torn loops where Maya had come out of them like they were nothing. The steel table. The cooler, upright now. Somebody had swept the broken glass into a tidy pile against the wall, the way a normal person tidies a normal room after a normal accident.

The chain was on the floor.

Empty.

Maya was across the concrete before she knew she'd moved. She went down on her knees and got her hands in it, and it was cold, and there was blood dried black down in the links, and it was open.

Not broken. Not cut.

Unlocked.

Somebody had walked in here with a key and taken him out and pulled the door shut behind them. Tidy. No hurry. The same hands that swept the glass into a pile.

That was what got her. Not the blood. The tidying. Somebody worked here.

Behind her, somebody swore softly. Somebody else backed out of the doorway.

"He's gone," Boone said from the doorway, and his voice had gone flat and old. "They've moved him. Nine hours early and he's already—"

"No."

Maya stayed on her knees with her hands full of chain.

Because she could feel him. Not a memory. Not a hope. The bond was tight and hot and screaming, and it wasn't pointing at the door. It wasn't pointing at the yard, or the road, or the vans, or east, or anywhere a truck could go.

It was pointing down.

She put her palm flat on the concrete floor.

"Kade." Her voice came out strange enough that the room turned. "Marlowe's layout. How many floors does this building have?"

Kade came in slow, one arm across his ribs. He looked at the paper in his hand. He looked at the floor. He looked at her.

"One," he said.

Nobody breathed. Thirty wolves in a concrete box, and not one of them so much as shifted their weight.

And under Maya's palm, six inches down through cold concrete, so faint that the woman she'd been a week ago could never have caught it in a hundred years, something enormous turned over and moved.