THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING MATE

Marked Changes

Wilder shut the door on Sloane.

He didn't slam it. Didn't yell. He just took the edge of it and closed it, slow, in her face, and the sound of that soft click was worse than anything he could have shouted. A slam was a man losing his grip. This was a man who didn't have to lose it. Who could take a door and close it in a killer's face like closing a book, and know she'd stay shut out because he'd decided she would. Sloane let him. That was the thing to remember about her, Maya was starting to see. You didn't move Sloane. She let herself be moved, and filed it away, and made you pay for it later.

The apartment went quiet. Just Maya's breathing left in it. Too fast. Her heart was going so hard it hurt. She put her back to the counter and worked on getting one clean breath into her and couldn't quite manage it.

She could feel the woman still out there. On the other side of the wood. Not gone. Waiting in the hall the way a cat waits at a mouse hole, in no hurry at all.

"You're bleeding," Wilder said.

"I'm not."

"Inside." He stepped closer. "Your heart. It's going too fast."

And there it was. One more piece of her that wasn't private anymore. Her own pulse. He could hear her pulse. Whatever walls she'd spent a whole life building, this man and his wolf walked straight through them like they weren't even there.

How did he—

Oh. Right. Wolf.

She kept forgetting. That was the insane part. She'd stand there and argue with him like he was some pushy guy who wouldn't take a hint, and then he'd hear her heartbeat through her ribs and she'd remember all over again what she'd let inside her apartment.

Maya crossed her arms over the slam of her own pulse like that could hide it. "Did you come here to narrate my vital signs?"

"I came here because you opened the door to her." His eyes were still gold. Not angry gold. Something else. Worried gold. "Sloane lies for sport. She's good at it. Best I've ever seen. He said it flat, like a fact he'd paid full price for. Not a warning about a stranger. A warning about somebody he knew all the way down to the floor."

"She said I get to live. Thanks to her, apparently."

"She said that so you'd think you owe her." He stopped three feet away. Stopped like there was a line drawn on the floor he wasn't going to cross. "You don't owe her shit."

The worst part was how badly she wanted that to be true. Some traitor corner of her had already started a little ledger anyway. Sloane. One favor. It didn't matter that the favor was Maya's own life still being in her body. A thing you were handed still felt like a thing you owed. Sloane knew that. Sloane had built the whole trap out of it.

The pull hit again.

The hook behind her ribs, dragging, harder this time than it had been all night, hard enough that her hand shot out and caught the edge of the counter before she'd decided to move.

Wilder saw it. Of course he did. He saw everything.

"What was that."

"Nothing."

"Liar." He was in front of her in one step. He didn't touch her. He just looked, close now, close enough that the pine and rain of him filled her whole head. "The mark. It's waking up in you.

He said it gently. That was what landed wrong. A man built like a warning label, gold-eyed and soaked and standing too close in her kitchen, and he'd gone soft, like the news was bad enough that even he didn't want to be the one holding it out to her."

Maya laughed. It came out wrong. Cracked down the middle. "There is no mark. Look at me. No teeth. No scars. Nothing bit me. It licked my knee and it left."

"Not that kind of mark." He lifted his hand. Slow. So slow, giving her all the time in the world to knock it away or step back.

She didn't do either.

His thumb brushed the soft skin under her eye.

And the world went gold.

For one second she saw the apartment the way he saw it. Heat blooming off every surface. Heartbeats, hers a rabbit-fast flutter, his a slow heavy drum. The lingering smell of Thai food and her own fear and Sloane's cold nothing-scent still hanging in the hall. And Wilder.

Wilder was fire. Pine and rain and something under it, something old and tired and so, so angry, banked down low and held there by a will she could suddenly feel the size of.

It was too much. All of it at once, a whole second world laid over the top of the one she knew. And under all of it, him. The shape of him. More than she'd ever agreed to know about anybody.

Then it was gone. Brown eyes again. The ordinary dark of her own apartment came slamming back, and her knees went out from under her.

He caught her. Of course he did.

"That's the change," he said, low, against her hair. "You're starting to see through me. Because I marked you. That's what it does."

"Take it back."

"Can't." His voice was rough. Wrecked, almost. "It doesn't come off. And it's going to get worse from here. The smells. The sounds. That pull, all the time, everywhere I am. And then the moon." He pulled back enough to look at her. "By the next full moon, it finishes. You'll either come through it as one of us. Or it'll tear you apart trying. There's no in-between. Nobody's ever found one.

Maya heard the words and couldn't make them add up to anything. A month. Maybe less, she didn't even know where the moon sat in its counting. A month to stop being the thing she'd been her whole life. Turn into something with teeth, or come apart trying to. There was no version of this where she walked out the other side still herself."

Maya shoved out of his arms. Got her own feet back under her out of pure spite.

"So that's it," she said. "Those are my options. The pack votes to kill me, or your bite turns me into a dog."

"No." He looked exhausted all of a sudden. Older than he had a minute ago. "There's a third."

"What."

"You run." He said it like the word took skin off on the way out. "Tonight. Right now. Far as a tank of gas gets you, and then further. And I don't follow."

The napkin sat on the counter behind him. Three words in a hand nobody would own.

Run. He'll follow.

Unless he doesn't.

She stared at the back of his wet head and tried to work out whether that was a kindness or just one more cage with the door left hanging open. With this man she honestly couldn't tell. Maybe he couldn't either.

The front door clicked.

Not open. Just the sound of a body leaning on it from the other side. Sloane. Still here. Still listening to every word, because of course she was.

"Don't listen to him," she called through the wood. Sweet as syrup. "Running is cruel, Wilder, and you know it. She'll die out there. Alone, half-turned, no pack, no one to teach her what she is. She'll go mad first and dead second." A pause. "Unless."

"Unless what," Maya said. She hated that she asked. She asked anyway.

The door opened. Sloane leaned in the frame, one shoulder on the jamb, like she'd never been shut out at all.

"Unless she stays," Sloane said. "With me. I can teach you to hold it. To ride the change instead of drowning in it. I can keep it from killing you." Her pale eyes slid to Wilder, then back. "Before he decides you're too dangerous to keep. Because he will. It's what Alphas do."

Two offers, then. Laid out on the table like cards.

Run, and maybe die out there in the dark.

Stay, and belong to Sloane.

Both of them dressed up as help. Both of them, once you scraped the nice words off, the same word sitting underneath. Ours. Maya had spent her whole life making good and sure she was nobody's. Forty dollars and a rented room and not one person alive who got to tell her what to do with either. And now two wolves stood in her apartment holding out leashes and calling them mercy.

Wilder didn't look at Sloane. He never took his eyes off Maya.

"Your choice," he said. "But make it fast." His head turned a fraction toward the window, toward the wet street three floors down, and the gold in his eyes went hard and flat. "Because I can smell them coming."

Them.

The pack.