Fate Picked Me, the Alpha Passed, and I Felt Nothing novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: His Reason

On Monday morning he drove me to a job on the lake road.

I didn't ask him to.

He was waiting beside his truck in front of the shop at seven with two coffees, and he held one out.

I took it.

"I'm hanging a pantry door at the Hartley place," I said. "It's eleven miles."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I felt you leaving the apartment."

"You felt me."

"Not what you were thinking," he said quickly. "Only that you were in motion."

I climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door.

He drove with both hands on the wheel, carefully.

The lake was grey and flat under a low October sky, and the maples along the road had gone the color of old brass.

About four miles out, he pulled into the gravel overlook above the water and put the truck in park.

He turned the engine off.

The silence was loud.

"I owe you the reason," he said.

"You owe me a lot of things."

"I'll start with that."

I turned in the seat and waited.

He looked out through the windshield with his hands still on the wheel.

"My mother died of a stroke when she was fifty-four," he said. "I was twenty-four."

"I remember the funeral."

"My father was the Alpha. They were fated mates, and they'd been together thirty years, and he never looked at another woman. When she went, the bond didn't go with her. That's what nobody tells you. It stayed on his side and had nowhere to go."

My coffee was cooling in my hand.

"He stopped eating," Dray said. "He stopped sleeping. He walked the lake road at night, calling her. I took over the pack at twenty-five because he couldn't sit at the table."

"Dray."

"He walked into Round Lake on the first of November. I found his boots on the Stone Landing at dawn."

I put the coffee in the cup holder.

I had never heard him say this much at once.

"I swore I'd never take a bond," he said. "I told Joss. I told the council. I told myself every year when the Naming came and nobody was called."

"And then the moon called me."

"And I looked at you in the moonlight, and the pull hit, and I thought, that's how it starts." His voice shook. "I thought, I'll be dead in thirty years the way he was, and you'll be left carrying it. So I said no before it could set."

"You said no to me."

"Yes."

"In front of seventy-four people."

"Yes."

"And you thought the cut would go both ways. You thought I'd be as empty as you."

"I thought it would be clean."

I rubbed a tired hand over my face.

"That's cowardice," I said.

He flinched, but he didn't look away.

"I'm sorry about your parents. I mean that. That's a terrible thing to watch at twenty-five."

"Thank you."

"But you didn't say no to me because of me. You said no to something you were scared of, and I was standing in front of it. And you made me stand there while you did it."

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