Hunted by the Alpha novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hand

Corwin offers his hand to keep the council off her for thirty days and lets her take one vial home, and Hettie wakes to tell her there is a wolf at the window.

"Give me that," I said.

Corwin held my phone above his shoulder and read the text from Joss out loud.

"She's burning up. Hurry."

His gold eyes lifted from the screen to my face.

"Who is Hettie?"

My mouth answered before my brain did, which is how most of my worst lies are born.

"My niece."

"You told me once you had no family."

"I told you a lot of things in a storm. Most of them were wrong."

That landed. I saw it land in the muscle along his jaw.

He looked at my zipped coat, and the corner of a foam tray showing at my collar.

"Blackthorn serum," he said. "Twelve vials. You know exactly what that is worth."

"I know what it does."

"It stops a half-blood's blood from eating its own body."

He said it flatly.

I kept my face still, but my heart beat so hard I thought he would hear it over the rain.

"My niece is sick," I said. "She's five. She will die without it."

"Then she is a wolf's child."

"She's a child."

For a moment neither of us moved.

Wolves came out of the trees behind him, five of them, gray and brown, and stood in a loose ring around my car.

None of them made a sound.

They were waiting for a word from the man in front of me.

"Take her," one of them said at last, in a man's voice, from the dark. "The law is plain, Alpha. She broke the cold store."

"I know the law."

"Sherman will want her at the table by morning."

"I know what Sherman will want."

Corwin did not turn around.

He took my wrist, turned it over and looked at the cut on my forearm.

His thumb pressed the edge of the wound, hard, and it hurt.

Then he let go.

"Here is the law," he said to me. "Anyone who steals from the pack's stores forfeits their life. The council votes at dawn, and I cannot stop the vote."

"Then kill me and be done."

"I can put my hand over you."

I stared at him.

"It's an old rule," he said. "A person under the alpha's hand cannot be harmed by the pack. Not touched, not run, not judged."

"What does that cost me?"

"Thirty days under my roof as the pack's physician."

"I'm a student."

"You are a fourth-year at Duluth Medical. My people ran your plate while you were running."

He had my school. He had my year.

And he had not once said the word daughter.

I breathed out slowly, and I made myself keep my voice flat.

"Thirty days," I said. "And my niece gets her dose tonight."

"She gets one vial. You keep the rest as security with me."

"That's not security. That's a hostage."

"It's a hostage that the council will never see."

He took the zipped coat off my shoulders himself, pulled out the foam tray and handed me back a single glass vial.

His fingers never touched my skin.

I noticed that. I noticed everything about him, and I hated myself for it.

"Go," he said. "My driver will follow your car to the end of your street and no farther."

"No."

"Then the council hears about the vials tonight."

I looked at the vial in my hand and thought of Hettie's gold eyes closing.

"Fine. To the end of the street."

I drove with the heater off, because the cold kept me from crying.

The black SUV stayed three car lengths back all the way to Fourth Avenue.

At the corner it stopped, and I kept going.

Joss opened our apartment door before I touched it.

"She's at a hundred and four," he whispered. "Where'd you get it?"

"Later."

I knelt on the foxes rug and found the injection site on Hettie's thigh with my thumb.

The needle went in smoothly.

I pushed the plunger and watched the clear liquid disappear.

Then I held her hand and counted her breaths, and Joss counted the minutes aloud, and neither of us said anything stupid.

By four in the morning her fever was down to a hundred and one.

By five, her lashes fluttered and her eyes opened, brown again.

"Mama," she said, thick with sleep.

"Hi, bug."

"I had the dream with the wolf."

I felt afraid, and I kept smoothing her hair.

"That's okay. Dreams can't hurt you."

"This one isn't in my head." She frowned up at the window. "He's right there."

I turned.

The window faced the alley, three floors up, behind a rusted fire escape.

Under the streetlight, on the fire escape landing, a huge black wolf sat very still with a white scar on his shoulder.

His eyes were the exact color of my daughter's.

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