I Married the Alpha They Threw Away novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Stones

Bram was splitting wood when I got back, in shirtsleeves, in the cold.

I told him what Hattie had said, all of it, in the time it took him to split one log.

He set the axe in the block and didn't say anything for a while.

Then he wiped his hands on his jeans.

"Come on."

He walked me behind the cabins, through dead bracken, to the black stone walls.

Up close they were bigger than they looked from the road.

A long foundation, a hearth as tall as a man, a stone staircase that went up four steps and stopped in the air.

Everything was scorched the color of a stove.

"This was theirs," he said. "The Silverborn lodge."

"I know what the Silverborn were."

"You know the bedtime story."

He put his hand flat on the hearthstone.

"White wolves with silver eyes. The old high line. Every pack in these mountains bent its neck to them."

"My father was their Beta, and his father before him."

"And then the fire."

"January, twenty-two years ago. A lamp tipped over, they said. The queen, her mate, their whole house."

He looked at me. "And a baby girl, three weeks old. They never found enough to bury."

The wind came off the lake and went straight through Bram's coat on my back.

"Two days later," I said, "Imogen found a baby under a tree."

"Yes."

"With this."

I held up the ring on its cord.

Bram reached for it, and stopped an inch away, and let his hand fall.

"Silver," he said. "I can't touch it. Neither can you, if you're what the pack says you are."

I closed my fist around it.

It was cool and smooth and didn't burn at all.

"Why did you say yes last night?" I asked. "In the hall."

"Why did you ask me?"

"I asked first."

He leaned back against the hearth and crossed his arms.

"Because you walked the whole length of that room, and nobody's walked toward me in six years," he said. "Your turn."

I could have lied.

I'd lied for a whole life in that house, smiling, saying thank you for the tea.

"Because I needed a claim before sunrise, and you were the one man there who'd make Corbin's face do that."

"I know," he said.

"You know?"

"I'm wolfless, Neve, not stupid." The almost-smile came back. "I don't care why. You picked me. That's more than I've had."

I looked at the black veins above his collar.

In the hall, under my mouth, they'd smoked.

I pressed my thumb against the broken edge of a stone until it split the skin.

"Hold still."

"What are you doing?"

I pulled his collar open and put my bleeding palm flat on his scar.

He hissed through his teeth.

The scar steamed in the cold air.

Under my hand, the black veins shrank back, slow.

When I lifted my hand, a strip of clean pale skin showed where they'd been.

Bram looked down at himself.

Then he looked at me, and his eyes were gold again.

"What are you?" he said, very quietly.

"I don't know."

"You're shaking."

"It's cold."

"It isn't that cold."

He took my bleeding hand in his huge one and turned it over, and put his mouth to the cut.

His beard scratched my wrist.

It wasn't cold anymore at all.

I went up on my toes and kissed him.

For a second he didn't move.

Then he made a low sound in his chest, and his hand came up into my hair.

He kissed me back.

He lifted me off my feet against the scorched hearth.

"Neve." His forehead dropped to mine. "You should go inside alone."

"Take me inside," I said.

He carried me through the cabin door, and I bit the side of his neck.

He didn't stop walking.

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