I Wed the Ruthless Alpha, and Now His Wolf Kneels to Me novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Poor Rock

The poor rock pile was a gray hill of mine waste with a black hole in the side of it.

My brother was standing in the hole.

Behind him, in the dark of the old Number Two drift, eyes gleamed.

Toivo had gotten thinner.

His nose was still crooked from a hockey stick in the eighth grade.

His beard had come in ragged, and he wore a canvas coat that had belonged to our father.

"You came," he said.

"You nailed a check to my porch."

"It's your porch now," he said.

"Toivo."

"Tell me why you did it." He hadn't raised his voice. "Everyone's been howling it since last night. My sister lit his lamp. My sister's the Cap'n's wife."

"I did it for the wardens."

"You did it for Mummu's barn."

I took the paper sack off the passenger seat of the pickup and held it out.

It held two loaves of rye, a bag of pulla ends and a block of cheese from the Dry's kitchen.

He looked at the sack, and I watched his pride and his stomach argue.

His stomach won.

He took it and passed it back into the dark without turning around.

I heard thirty people stop pretending they weren't listening.

"The fire in the barn," I said. "Was it you?"

His face closed.

"One of mine," he said at last. "He's got a foot half frozen, and he crept in there to sleep by the cow. He had a lantern. He fell asleep with it lit."

"Mummu burned her hand."

"I know what she burned. I carried her out of that barn myself and went back for the cow, and then I ran."

His voice cracked on the last word.

I put my hand on his arm.

He let it stay a moment, and then he shook it off.

"Thirty-one of us," he said. "No checks, no wood, no work. Half of us drove plow for the Cap'n until the week he broke us. You think we want to steal rye from our own grandmothers?"

"Then stop."

"Tell your husband to hang our checks," he said.

"I'll ask him."

"Ask." He barked a laugh. "You lit the lamp, Marja. You got him by something. Tell him."

I started to say that I didn't understand what he meant.

Behind him, every wolf in the drift went silent.

At the top of the pile, against the last gray light, a black shape had come up over the rim.

It was a wolf, huge, heavy through the chest, with pale eyes and a long scar down one foreleg.

It came down the slope in the snow without a sound.

Toivo shoved me behind him.

"Toivo, don't," I said. "That's him."

The wolf was already moving.

It crossed the last twenty feet in two bounds.

It hit the snow in front of my brother with its lips peeled back from its teeth.

Toivo threw up an arm.

I saw the jaws open.

"Don't!" I screamed.

The wolf stopped.

It stopped in mid-lunge, so hard that its hind legs slid out from under it.

It ended up on its belly in the snow, a foot from my brother's throat, shuddering.

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