He Starved My Wolf for Ten Years, So I Burned His Proof novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Clearing
Kneeling in cuffs, Wynne faces the Alpha who broke their bond, refuses the Luna Accord with a fire, and feels the mark burn hot for the first time in ten years.
The bond with Bram Hollister broke ten years ago, but the mark on my neck still burned cold when his SUVs came up the logging road.
The enforcers had hauled me out of my grandmother's cabin before sunrise.
They put me on my knees in the gravel beside the woodpile and told me not to move.
The silver cuffs ate into my wrists.
I stopped feeling my legs an hour before the engines.
Four doors opened.
Boots came across the gravel, slow and even, and I kept my eyes on the dirt.
Then they stopped.
"Stand up."
His voice had not changed in ten years.
It was low and level, the voice that made grown wolves do what they were told without deciding to.
I used to wake up wanting to hear it.
I stayed where I was.
"Wynne," he said, and my name came out rough, as if it had caught on something. "Please. Stand."
I pushed up off my knees.
The ground tilted and I locked my legs and breathed in and out until it settled.
The wolfsbane they had fed me at dawn sat in my stomach, thick and bitter.
Bram Hollister looked the same.
He was tall and broad in a black wool coat, with the Ashmoor pin on the collar, dark hair cut close, jaw shaved clean.
He looked like the Alpha of the whole valley.
I looked like something left in a cellar for ten years.
His eyes went over me once, from my hair to my wrists to the collarbones standing out under my shirt.
He did not flinch at the silver scars.
He had seen me like this before.
He was the one who had made me like this.
"You've lost weight," he said.
I said nothing.
Behind him, four enforcers stood at the cars with their heads turned a little to the side.
They had stood that way every morning for ten years when they brought my cup.
Not one of them had ever looked me in the face.
I figured it was shame, or that I was beneath looking at.
Bram walked into the cabin.
I heard the door, then his boots on the floorboards, then a chair scraping.
When he came back out he was carrying my grandmother's kitchen table by its rotted legs.
He set it down in the clearing between us and laid one sheet of paper in the middle.
A red wax seal sat at the bottom, pressed with the Ashmoor crest.
The Luna Accord.
I had known for ten years that it was coming.
Seeing it on my grandmother's table, with the wax still shining, did something ugly to my chest anyway.
"You'll sign it at the Alliance Ceremony in two days," Bram said. "In front of all eight Alphas. It will be quiet and it will be dignified."
His finger tapped the page.
"You'll transfer your grandmother's territorial rights to Fiona Crane, and then I'll release you from the bond."
Release me.
As if I had been the one hanging on.
Down deep, under the wolfsbane, under ten years of silence, something moved.
It was small, a flicker, a single breath.
Briar.
My wolf, barely alive, but alive.
The mark on my neck pulsed once.
It was still cold, still dead.
But it had pulsed.
Across the clearing the enforcers were unloading the second SUV.
Chains.
A long steel transport cage on a folding frame.
They worked fast and didn't talk.
They had done this before.
I looked at the paper.
Then I looked at the cabin.
The logs were in there.
Ten years of them, one for every morning, on the shelf above the stove.
Every day they had made me sign a line saying I took the wolfsbane willingly.
That I understood it was for my own safety.
That I was cooperating.
Bram needed those pages.
They were his proof that I had been cared for, that nobody had done a single illegal thing to me, that every day of it had been necessary.
I moved before I could think about it.
I turned my back on the table and walked to the cabin on legs that shook but held.
Bram said something behind me, sharp, and I did not stop.
I shoved the door open with my shoulder.
The logs were on the shelf where they always were, a fat stack tied with twine.
Hundreds of pages, and my name at the bottom of every one.
On the counter, next to the wood stove, was a box of kitchen matches.
The silver made my fingers clumsy.
I got the box open on the third try and pulled out a single match.
I struck it against the rough side of the stove.
It caught, small and bright.
I touched it to the corner of the top page and watched the paper brown and curl.
"Wynne."
Bram was in the doorway.
The enforcers were behind him, and not one of them moved.
The fire climbed the stack.
Heat rolled up into my face.
And on my neck, where ten years of cold had been, the mark went hot.
Not warm.
Hot, a long line of fire from my ear to my shoulder, like the day he had given it to me.
Bram's hand slammed against the door frame.
His eyes went to my neck, and for the first time since he stepped out of the car, he really looked at me.
Then his face shut.
"Put her in the cage," he said.
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