Resisting My Brother’s Alpha

Chapter Two — The Road Out

I made it eleven steps.

Not to the door — that would have required going down the length of the hall past the high table, past him, and my body had made an executive decision about that somewhere around step three. So I went sideways. Through the kitchen. Past Marta's big steel prep counters and the girls stacking plates, out the service door into the cold, and then I was running.

Not shifting. Running, on two legs, like a human, up the slope toward the equipment barn where I'd left the Jeep because there hadn't been room down by the fence.

The night air hit my lungs and did nothing. He was still in them.

That's the part nobody explains right either. They tell you about the pull, the recognition, the knowing — and they say it like it's a feeling. It isn't a feeling. A feeling you can sit with. This was chemical. This was my own body turning on me, rearranging its furniture, deciding without consulting me that the center of the world had moved sixty feet to the left and was wearing a black shirt.

I got to the barn. Got the door of the Jeep open. Got in.

And then I sat there with the key in my hand and my hand on the ignition and I did not turn it, because my wolf had gone flat on the floor of my chest and was making a sound I had never heard her make before.

Not a growl. A whine.

He's back there, she said. Turn around. He's back there and we're leaving and I don't understand, I don't understand, turn around—

"Shut up," I said out loud, in an empty car, in the dark. "Shut up."

I turned the key.

The engine caught. The headlights swung across the barn wall, across stacked hay and a disassembled tractor and the long gravel track that ran down past the paddock and out to the county road, and standing in the middle of that track, dead center, arms folded, was Rhys Blackthorn.

I hit the brake so hard the Jeep bucked.

He didn't move. He was maybe forty feet out, lit up white in the high beams, and he did not so much as squint. Just stood there with the light pouring over him and waited, the way you'd wait for a dog to stop barking.

He'd left his own hall. In front of forty wolves and the entire Ironvale delegation, in the middle of his own welcome feast, the Alpha had walked out the side door and gotten here before me.

I thought about the gas pedal. Honestly, seriously thought about it, for a full second and a half.

Then I killed the engine.

The silence afterward was enormous.

I got out. Left the door open, which was stupid, but the open door felt like a thing I could still get back into. The gravel crunched under my boots. Ten feet from him I stopped, because that was as close as my dignity would allow and considerably closer than my self-preservation wanted.

For a long moment neither of us said anything.

Up close he was worse. Up close the scent wasn't in the air anymore, it was on me, settling into my hair and the weave of my sweater, and my skin had started doing something appalling — going warm in patches, at the throat, at the wrists, everywhere the blood ran close to the surface. Offering. My own traitorous circulatory system, rolling over.

"Alpha," I said.

"Don't." His voice was low and it scraped. "Not from you. Not tonight."

"That's what everyone else calls you."

"You're not everyone else." He said it flatly, like a fact he resented. "That's the entire problem, isn't it."

The wind moved through the pines above the barn. Somewhere down the hill a door banged and somebody laughed, and it sounded like it was happening on another planet.

"I'm leaving," I said.

"I know."

"So move."

"No."

I'd been braced for a lot of things. Anger. An order. The full weight of an Alpha's voice coming down on the back of my neck — I'd felt that once, when I was sixteen and his father caught me out past the boundary, and I still remembered the way my knees had gone to water before I'd even processed the words.

He didn't do that. He just stood in my road and said no like a man declining a second drink.

"You can't stop me leaving," I said. "I'm not sworn. I never took the oath, I'm not yours to—"

I heard it a half second too late.

Yours.

Something happened in his face. It was small — a muscle at the jaw, the smallest tightening — but I watched it go through him like a current, and my wolf surged up so hard at the sight of it that I had to lock my knees.

"Careful," he said quietly.

"I didn't mean—"

"I know what you meant." He breathed out. "It doesn't matter what you meant. That's what this is, Wren. Every word out of your mouth is going to come out sideways for the next month and you're going to have to learn to live with it."

"I'm not going to be here for the next month."

"No," he agreed. "You're not."

And that — for some reason that landed harder than anything else he'd said. Easy agreement. No fight. He'd walked out of his own feast, run half a mile uphill in the dark, planted himself in front of a moving vehicle, and now he was agreeing with me.

"Then what do you want?" I said.

He looked at me. Really looked, for the first time since the hall — gold eyes going over my face, my shoulders, my hands, the same inventory I'd watched him take of the room. And his expression didn't change at all, and I would have given a year of my life to know what he was counting.

"Two things," he said. "Then you can go."

"I'm listening."

"First." He shifted his weight, and I caught something then — his left hand, hanging at his side, was bleeding. Slowly. From a long splinter wound across the palm where an oak chair back had come apart under his grip. He hadn't done anything about it. Hadn't even seemed to notice. "Your brother doesn't know."

"No."

"He's not going to know."

"That's not a request."

"No," Rhys said. "It isn't."

"You don't get to—"

"Caleb mates tomorrow at moonrise." His voice stayed perfectly level. "He's waited four years for that girl. He begged his Alpha for the ceremony because her father thought he wasn't good enough and I had to make it a matter of pack honor to get it done. That's tomorrow. That's tomorrow, Wren. Now you tell me what happens to him if he finds out tonight that his Alpha — the man he's sworn to, the man who'd have his throat if he stepped wrong — is the fated mate of his sister."

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

Because I knew exactly what happened. Caleb would go for him. Not because Caleb could win — Caleb would last about six seconds — but because my brother had never once in his life measured a fight before walking into it, and because the only thing he'd ever been reliably stupid about was me.

And an Alpha cannot let a sworn wolf come at him in front of the pack and live. It isn't cruelty. It's structure. The whole thing comes apart if he does.

"You'd kill him," I said.

"I'd have to." No hesitation. That was the worst part. He didn't dress it up, didn't tell me he'd find a way, didn't offer me a single comfortable thing. "And it would break something in this pack that wouldn't heal in my lifetime. So he doesn't know. Not tomorrow, not ever, if we're lucky."

The wind came through again. I was very cold suddenly, everywhere except the places where my blood kept betraying me.

"Fine," I said. "He doesn't know. What's the second thing?"

Rhys was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, "Don't come back."

I laughed. It came out wrong — too high, cracking in the middle.

"You think I want to—"

"I think," he said, "that in about three days you're going to start feeling something you've never felt before. In a week it'll be worse. In two weeks you'll stop sleeping. And somewhere in there, some night at about four in the morning, you're going to find yourself in your car with the keys in your hand and no memory of deciding to get in." He paused. "I'm telling you now so that when it happens, you'll recognize it. And you'll get out of the car."

I stared at him.

"You've thought about this," I said slowly. "You've — it's been ninety minutes and you've already—"

"I've had ninety minutes to think about very little else."

"Why?" My voice came out ragged and I hated it. "Why does it matter to you? You get your treaty, you get your Ironvale girl, you get your war that doesn't happen. Why do you care what I do at four in the morning in another state?"

And for one second — one single second — something came up behind those gold eyes that was not calculation at all.

It was there and gone so fast I'd spend the next three weeks wondering if I'd made it up.

"Get in your car, Wren," he said.

"Answer the question."

"Get in your car."

"Answer the—"

He moved.

Not fast. That was somehow worse — he crossed the ten feet between us at an unhurried walk and I did not step back, because some i***t ancestral part of me refused to, and then he was close enough that I had to tip my head to hold his eyes and close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him and close enough that his scent stopped being something I smelled and became something I was standing inside.

My wolf went silent. Utterly. Like a held breath.

He didn't touch me.

He stood there with his bleeding hand at his side and looked down at me and I watched him not touch me, and the space between us — four inches, maybe five — had more in it than any room I'd ever been in.

"Because," he said, very quietly, "I'm going to marry a woman I've met twice, in twenty-eight days, to stop three hundred people from dying. And I can do that. I've been ready to do that since I was nineteen years old." He breathed in once, slow, and something in his throat moved. "But I can't do it with you two hundred yards down the hill. I'm not that strong. No one is."

Then he stepped back.

"Ceremony's at moonrise," he said, in an entirely different voice — flat, official, an Alpha talking to a guest. "You'll stand up with your brother. You'll be gone by morning. I won't be at the feast after."

He turned and walked down the track toward the lights and the noise and the woman with the silver pin at her throat, and he never looked back once.

I stood in the dark next to my idling memory of a car with my hands shaking so hard I had to put them under my arms.

Twenty-eight days, my wolf said.

"No," I said.

Twenty-eight days.