I Saw My Alpha Mate's Betrayal, So I Changed Fate novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Signal Ridge

At her grandmother's lookout, the exiled keeper Abel tells her she's on his mountain; at dawn her photo of the valley shows the ridge and the grove on fire Saturday night, and a man with a torch in her twin's jacket.

I sat on the tailgate holding the black square until my fingers went numb.

Gran's had looked exactly like this.

Two years ago I photographed her on her porch swing, and the picture came out.

Three days later she was gone.

I put the photo in my shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it.

Then I got back in the truck and drove up.

The ridge road was twelve miles of washboard and switchbacks, and nobody had graded it since the funeral.

My headlights swung across pine trunks and long drops into nothing.

The bond still throbbed under my ribs, a raw place.

My phone buzzed on the seat every few minutes.

Mom. Mom. Damien. Mom. Lowell.

I turned it face down and kept climbing.

Where the road gave out, I parked and walked the last half mile under the moon.

I smelled him before I saw him.

Woodsmoke, pine pitch and wet fur.

A gray wolf stood in the middle of the path.

He was huge, bigger than anyone in the Silverfir Pack, and his left ear was torn in a ragged V.

He didn't growl.

He didn't step aside either.

"I'm not in the mood," I told him.

His eyes caught the moonlight and held it.

Then the bones began to crack.

I turned my back, because my mother raised me right, even if she raised me to be a doormat.

Behind me a tin lid scraped, and denim rustled.

"You can look."

Abel Cutler stood barefoot on the trail in a pair of old jeans.

He was buttoning a flannel shirt he'd pulled out of a lockbox under a rock.

He was taller than I remembered, with a short dark beard and a scar through his left eyebrow.

Gran used to call him her stray.

The pack called him worse.

"You're on my mountain," he said.

"It's mine. Gran left it to me."

"Gran left you a lookout you haven't climbed to in two years."

That landed, because it was true.

"You carried her coffin," I said. "You stood right next to me and didn't say a word."

"You didn't look like you wanted words."

He tipped his head and breathed in, slow.

His nose wrinkled.

"You smell like a torn bond."

"I rejected my mate tonight."

"Stroud?"

"Yes."

He thought about that for a second.

"Good," he said, and turned and walked up the path.

I followed him, because he had the flashlight and I had my pride, and only one of those worked in the dark.

The lookout sat on the very top of Signal Ridge like a lantern somebody had forgotten to light.

A stone base, a steep wooden stair, and a one-room glass cab with a catwalk running all the way around it.

Below it, four small cabins sat dark in a row along the slope.

Inside, it still smelled like Gran.

Coffee grounds, cedar, and the lemon soap she bought by the case.

The woodstove ticked.

Her fire finder stood on its post in the middle of the room, the brass sighting ring polished bright.

There were two bunks.

One had a canvas jacket thrown across it.

The other had Gran's red wool blanket on it, tucked tight at the corners, the pillow fluffed.

I looked at him.

He looked at the stove.

"You kept her bed made," I said.

"Dust gets in."

"For two years."

"There's a lot of dust."

I sat down on Gran's bunk and the springs creaked the way they always had.

Something in my chest cracked the same way.

"I'll sleep on the catwalk," he said.

"You'll sleep in your own bunk. I'm not throwing a man out of his bed on the first night."

"Your mountain."

"My mountain, my rules."

He almost smiled.

I saw it start at the corner of his mouth and get put away.

He lay down on his bunk with his boots still on and his back to me.

I lay on mine and stared at the stars through the glass roof.

Iris's robe sliding off her shoulder.

Damien's mouth on her collarbone.

Lowell laughing.

She'll hand you anything.

I got up again and stepped out onto the catwalk.

The night air was cold and sharp with pine.

The whole valley lay below me in the moonlight, the town's few streetlights, the river.

At the head of the valley, right under the ridge, the old cedars of the Moon Grove made a dark ring.

That was where I was supposed to stand on Saturday.

Through the glass, Gran's clock over the stove said 11:52.

Still Wednesday.

I lifted the camera, framed the valley from the ridge to the grove, and pressed the shutter.

The photo slid out, and I shielded it from the wind with my hand.

Gray, then darker.

Then orange.

The whole ridge below me was burning.

Fire poured down the slope in long red tongues, and the cabins were black frames inside it.

At the bottom, it had reached the Moon Grove, and the cedars stood up like torches.

My hand started to shake.

"What is it?"

Abel was in the doorway behind me, his eyes on my face.

I couldn't answer him.

I was looking at the corner of the picture.

A man stood on the slope below the cabins with a drip torch in his hand, laying a line of fire through the grass.

His face was turned away.

But I knew that jacket.

Red wool, white leather sleeves, a big letter S on the back.

My twin brother had worn it every day since we were sixteen.

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