CHAPTER 3
956 Words
ZARA
I do not sleep.
I lie on my back and let the sounds of the house come to me. Dad's voice downstairs, low and steady. Ryder answering in single syllables. The front door opens. The front door closes. Someone went out. Someone came back.
Sable is completely awake inside me, pacing in tight circles.
At two forty-seven in the morning, my father sits down on the edge of my bed.
"Get dressed," he says. "Warm layers. Do it fast."
I am dressed in under two minutes. He is already downstairs. Both my bags, the large travel bag and the small one I packed with Mom's photographs and the bracelet she wore every day, are sitting by the front door. I packed them yesterday, not because anyone told me to, but because I knew. Dad sees me look at them. He does not ask how I knew.
"The car is in the alley. Lights off." He checks his watch. "We have a forty-minute window before the shift change on patrol."
"Before what?"
"Before the border sentries rotate. We go now."
I look at Ryder. He is loading a duffel bag with things that clink against each other in a specific way.
"Are those weapons?"
He zips the bag.
"Stay close to me," Dad says. "No phones after the border. I will explain everything once we are clear."
We move. The house that has been mine since I was four years old slides away behind us in the dark without a proper goodbye. I store that somewhere I will look at later, when there is time.
At the edge of Redwood Hollow's territory, two sentries step onto the road from the tree line. My hand moves before I think about it, reaching for something that is not there because I left all my weapons in my room two nights ago after the party and did not put them back.
A third shape steps out of the shadows.
Carter.
He says something to the sentries that I cannot hear. They step back. He comes to my father's window and they talk in low voices that do not carry. Carter glances at me once in the back seat. His face has something on it I have not seen there before.
"Thank you," my father tells him. "For all of it."
"Take care of them," Carter says. "And yourself." He steps back. Dad drives.
We clear the border. The headlights come on. The road opens ahead of us into dark.
"Tell me everything," I say.
Dad drives another full mile before he speaks.
"Four days ago, Alpha Vance called me into his office." He watches the road. "He told me he had great admiration for the warrior I raised in you. He told me that a girl with your skills and your appearance deserved a secure future in this pack." He pauses. "He offered to make you his mate."
The car goes completely silent.
"He framed it as an offer. It was a decision he had already made. He told me that my standing in this pack depended on how I responded." His voice stays level. Dad's voice is always most level when he is most furious. "I told him I needed time to think. Then I called your grandmother."
"His mate has been dead for two years," Ryder says from the front seat.
"He is forty-seven years old," Dad says. "You are seventeen." He finds my eyes in the rearview mirror. "There was no version of that conversation I was going to agree to."
"Where are we going?"
"Your mother grew up in a pack called Iron Ridge. Her parents are still there. I called them. Their Alpha agreed to take us in."
Iron Ridge. Every pack on the continent knows that name.
"Their Alpha," Ryder says carefully, "is supposed to be something completely different from anything else out there."
"He is," Dad says. "Which is exactly why Vance will not follow us past their border." He reaches back and squeezes my hand. "You are going to be safe. That is the only thing I am thinking about right now."
An hour later, he pulls over and asks us to denounce our pack membership. We have to become rogues for the stretch of road between Redwood Hollow's border and Iron Ridge's. It is the only way. The pack bond breaking is physical, a sudden silence in the chest where there used to be warmth, like going deaf in one ear.
I press my palm flat over my sternum and breathe through it.
"I know," Dad says. "I am sorry."
"Do not be." I take my hand away. "It is the right call."
My phone rings three times from an unknown number. I save everything to the cloud, turn the phone off, roll the window down.
I throw it into the dark and watch the darkness take it.
We drive into early morning. The landscape changes. Low coastal scrub gives way to old-growth forest, trees so tall and dense they close the sky. The air coming through the cracked window is cold and smells like pine and mountain stone and something else, something faint and vivid, like caramel warming over a wood fire.
Then something moves through the trees.
Huge. Dark. Running parallel to the road and keeping pace with the car without any visible effort. My eyes catch it for a single second, a shape that is far too large to be what it appears to be, and then it is gone between the trunks and the caramel scent goes with it.
Sable goes electric inside my chest.
"What was that?" I ask.
Dad and Ryder look at each other.
"I think," Dad says slowly, "that was their Alpha."
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