Chapter 4: Up the Mountain

By dawn the fire truck had gone and the pit lot smelled like a tire dump.

My hauler was a black steel skeleton.

The #03 sat inside it on its melted tires, the body gone, the frame warped.

Myra stood next to me with her cap in her hands. She hadn't said anything for an hour.

I climbed into what was left of the cockpit. The seat had burned down to the aluminum shell.

The steering wheel had melted off the column and dropped in a lump on the floor.

My father put that wheel on with his own hands the year I turned eighteen.

I picked it up. It was still warm.

"Hay," Myra said. "What are you doing?"

"Going to breakfast."

The pack eats breakfast in the clubhouse every Sunday after a race, at long tables under the old checkered flags.

My father started it.

Eighty people were there when I walked in.

They went quiet in waves, front tables first.

I smelled of smoke.

My jeans were black to the knee.

The wheel was in my hand.

Cleve sat at the back table with his father, a plate of eggs and sausage in front of him.

I walked straight down the room.

I set the melted wheel on top of his eggs.

It sat there in the yolk, warped and black, with a bit of blue paint still stuck to the hub.

"You forgot something," I said.

Cleve stared at it. His neck went red.

"What the hell, Hayley?"

I leaned down close to him and breathed in.

Under the soap and the coffee and the cheap aftershave, it was there.

It was pump gas, not the race fuel we all reek of, soaked into the skin of his hands.

"You showered," I said. "You should've scrubbed your knuckles. I can smell the gas on you from here."

Every wolf in that room could smell it now that I'd said it. I watched them figure it out.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Alpha Hayley's Destined Mate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.