THE ALPHA'S BRIDE IS A ROGUE

CHAPTER 3: TERMS

Wren

The knock came in two soft raps, and then a wait. Wren noticed. Four hours in this house and it was the first time anyone had knocked on anything.

She didn't get up. The floor was cold and she preferred it, since beds were where people found you. She was beneath the window with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up, the door in full view. Somebody had left a sweater and dry socks on the bed. She'd put on the socks. The sweater she had folded and set aside like something she hadn't been paid to accept.

"It's open," she said.

He came in and left the door wide behind him. She noticed that too.

The room smelled of lavender soap and someone else's laundry. In lamplight he looked worse and better than he had on the ridge. Worse, because the shadows under his eyes were the kind that took years to grow. Better, because he'd stopped looking at her as if she were a miracle and started looking at her as if she were a person, which was harder to stand.

"Did they vote to kill me?" Wren asked. "I'd like it in order. Bad news first."

"They voted to give you thirty days."

"That's the good news?"

"It's the only news."

She pressed her palm flat against her sternum. The warm thing in her head had not stopped humming since the ridge. "What is this?" she said. "The noise. Or the opposite of noise."

"The mate bond. It's a link. Yours to me, mine to you. Usually it's faint until there's a mark." He hesitated. "I've never had one. I only know what I've been told."

"Reassuring."

"I'm not trying to reassure you."

"I noticed." She almost liked him for it. Her wolf pushed at the edge of her mind, eager and ridiculous, like a dog at a screen door.

He told her plainly, in sequence: the law, the four dead, the marriage that would make her Luna in name and buy her a month. She listened without moving, one hand closed around the copper ring on its cord at her throat, thumb worrying the worn edge. When he finished she let the silence sit. It was the only weapon she had.

"Let me see if I've got it. The man whose dogs held a knife to me wants me to marry him."

"They're wolves."

"I'm not calling them anything nicer."

"And if you refuse, I go back to that room and argue for a border escort. I might lose."

"Might."

"Probably," Rhys said. "But I would make it hard enough that Dax would think twice."

Her mother used to say kindness was a currency and the first payment was always the cheapest. Wren looked at the man in her doorway and couldn't find the hook. That frightened her more than a knife would have.

"Why?" she said.

He gave her an actual answer, which she hadn't expected. "Because the bond isn't your fault. You didn't ask for it. I won't make you pay for it with your life."

Her jaw went tight. It wasn't anger. It was the look of someone who had braced for a blow and been handed a glass of water, and didn't know where to put it.

"And the killings," she said. "Everyone thinks a rogue did it."

"Yes."

"So you'll present the pack with a rogue in a wedding dress."

"Yes."

"You're not very good at politics, are you?"

"I'm told I'm terrible." Something almost like a smile crossed his face. "Marguerite says I have no sense of theater."

A sound escaped Wren that might have been a laugh if she'd allowed it. She covered it by looking at the ring. When she looked up, her face had gone practical, like a woman sitting down to read a contract.

"Terms."

"Go on."

"Thirty days, like she said. Separate rooms. The door locks from the inside and I keep the key."

"Done."

"You don't go poking around my head through this bond thing."

"I don't know that I can. But no." His gray eyes held hers. "I wouldn't."

"And when the thirty days are up, if your pack still hates me, I walk. Not escorted. Walk."

"Alive. On my word."

"Your word." She tested it like a plank over a river. "What do you get out of this?"

"A pack that doesn't have to watch me execute my mate."

"Not your mate. Your problem."

"Then I'd like to keep my problem alive," said Rhys.

For one second the wariness in her face slipped, and he saw what was under it. Exhaustion, and beneath the exhaustion something small and startled that looked a lot like being seen.

She hated it. She hated it so much she almost wanted to cry. In six years she had been offered two jobs, one kiss, and a bed in exchange for a favor she'd declined. Nobody had ever offered her a door she could lock.

The shutters came down, neat and quick. "Fine," said Wren Ashdown. "I'll marry you."

And in the back of her head, where a wall had been that morning, the warm thing hummed once, softly, like a cat settling.

She decided not to name it.