Ride or Die: The Alpha's Reckless Queen

Chapter 8: The World's Worst Home Renovation Deal

Moving in with werewolves felt like the world's worst home renovation deal.

I signed no paperwork, because apparently pack law didn't run on paperwork, but I got a cabin at the edge of the compound anyway — small, clean, better furnished than my own place back home, which felt like a strange kind of insult given the circumstances. Someone had stocked the kitchen with groceries I actually liked, a detail I didn't examine too closely because examining it meant wondering how anyone here had learned my preferences in the span of a single conversation at a gate.

I packed one bag. I told myself it was temporary, a practical measure until the garage was standing again, nothing more permanent than a hotel stay with better scenery and considerably worse implications. I did not let myself think too hard about the fact that I was moving in with an entire pack of werewolves on the strength of one man's word that it was for my own protection. Ronan walked me through it himself, pointing out the woodstove, the well-stocked pantry, the extra blankets in the closet like he was hosting a very tense bed and breakfast rather than sheltering a woman he'd just informed was living among werewolves against her better judgment.

"You'll eat with the pack," he said. "Dinner's at seven. Nobody will bother you otherwise."

"And if I have questions before seven?"

"Then you'll have to survive the wait," he said, and there was something almost like humor in it, dry and understated, the first joke I'd heard him attempt since I'd met him. "I'm not always available at a moment's notice, Rae Calloway, contrary to how this arrangement might look."

"Could've fooled me. You've shown up at my house twice in two days."

"That's different," he said, and didn't elaborate, which told me everything and nothing at once.

He left me to unpack in silence after that, and I spent a few minutes just standing in the middle of the small cabin, taking stock of a life that had rearranged itself so completely in the span of a week that I barely recognized the shape of it anymore. Three days ago I'd been a mechanic worried about permits and payroll. Now I was a mechanic worried about permits and payroll who also happened to be living among werewolves, courtesy of a man who flinched at my touch like it burned and looked at me like I was a puzzle he hadn't decided whether he wanted to solve.

I unpacked my one bag slowly, hanging my father's jacket on a hook by the door where I could see it, and told myself, unconvincingly, that everything about this arrangement was still entirely under my control.

"Nobody will bother me," I repeated. "Except you, apparently. Since you've appointed yourself my liaison."

He didn't so much as blink. "Someone needs to answer your questions. I'd rather it be me than someone with less patience for them."

I noticed the way the other wolves looked at that arrangement — quick, assessing glances between Ronan and me that vanished the second either of us caught them looking, the kind of glances that meant something in a language I hadn't learned yet. Whatever this arrangement was, it wasn't standard. I filed that away with everything else I didn't understand about this place.

Dinner that first night was its own education. Twenty, maybe thirty people crowded around long tables in the main hall, loud and easy with each other in a way that felt more like family than criminal enterprise, passing dishes hand to hand with the same eerie, wordless synchronization I'd noticed on the build site. Killian sat across from me, grinning like my presence was the best entertainment the compound had seen in months. An older woman I hadn't met yet — sharp-eyed, silver-haired, introduced only as "Mara" — watched me the entire meal with an expression I couldn't read, somewhere between suspicion and calculation. She didn't speak to me directly, not once, but I caught her tracking every word Ronan said to me across the table, every small courtesy he extended, cataloguing it like evidence toward some conclusion she hadn't decided whether to be alarmed by yet.

Others were friendlier, or at least performed friendliness well enough that I couldn't tell the difference. A young man named Dax asked me, with real curiosity, whether it was true humans couldn't smell rain coming until it actually started falling, and seemed genuinely baffled when I confirmed it. A woman near the end of the table, introduced as one of the pack's healers, offered me a second helping of stew with a warmth that felt entirely uncomplicated, the first interaction all night that didn't carry some undertone I couldn't fully parse.

"First human to sit at this table in a decade," Killian said cheerfully, apropos of nothing, earning a look from Ronan sharp enough to cut glass.

"Killian."

"What? I'm being hospitable. Historical context is hospitable."

I filed that away too. A decade. That was a specific number, the kind of number that meant something had happened a decade ago to make humans unwelcome at this table, and I had a sinking, cold suspicion that whatever it was tied back to the same buried history everyone kept dancing around whenever my father's name came up.

I didn't sleep well that first night. The cabin was warm, the bed was better than my own, and none of it mattered, because my mind kept circling back through everything I'd learned in the span of one afternoon — werewolves, packs, ranks disguised as patches, a decade-old absence of humans at this very table I'd just eaten at — until the walls of the cabin felt less like shelter and more like the edge of a world I hadn't agreed to fall into.

Somewhere past midnight I woke to the sound of howling — close, closer than felt safe, a long, rising note that raised every hair on my arms and pulled me upright in bed with my heart slamming against my ribs.

It cut off abruptly. Silence rushed back into the space it left, thick and total, and I sat there in the dark counting my own heartbeat until a knock came at my door not sixty seconds later.

I opened it to find one of the younger pack members — a boy who couldn't have been older than twenty, soaked through with sweat like he'd sprinted a marathon, chest heaving, hair plastered to his forehead despite the cold October night.

"Sorry," he said, breathless, not quite meeting my eyes. "Just — wanted to check you were alright. Heard the howling might've spooked you."

"Were you the one howling?" I asked, because he looked like he'd been running considerably harder than a simple check-in required, and the question came out before I'd fully decided to ask it.

He hesitated. Just half a second, but I'd gotten good at reading half-seconds since arriving here.

"Get some sleep," he said instead of answering, and disappeared back into the dark before I could push further, leaving me standing in my doorway with the cold night air against my skin and a new, sharper edge of unease settling into my chest.

I stood there a long moment after he'd gone, listening to the silence settle back over the compound, trying to convince myself that whatever had just happened in the dark beyond my cabin had a simple, boring explanation. A perimeter check. A training exercise. Anything that didn't involve grown men running fast enough through the woods at midnight to arrive soaked in sweat within a minute of a howl cutting off.

I didn't believe it. I hadn't believed a single reassuring thing anyone here had told me since the moment I'd learned what they were, and some old, stubborn instinct told me that wouldn't be changing anytime soon.

I went back to bed anyway, because there wasn't much else to do with the information, and lay there staring at the ceiling until the gray edge of dawn started creeping through the curtains. Somewhere out past the tree line, whatever had howled tonight was still out there. I wondered, drifting finally toward an uneasy sleep, whether it had been a warning meant for me, or a warning meant for something else entirely — something I hadn't yet learned to be afraid of.