Chapter 9: Delivered

Dashiell's POV

I sent her home in my own car and told the driver to take the long way.

Then I went back up sixty floors, locked my office, and stood in front of the safe for a full minute before I opened it.

The paper was where I had left it.

Cream stock, Howling Bay's crest at the top, three pages.

It had come by courier four months ago, with a note in Winifred Lowell's round, motherly hand.

The note said: A gift between packs. Think of it as a friendship.

The first page named the gift.

Wynne Tarrant, twenty-four, unmated, of this pack.

The second page named the price.

Two docks on the north shore, a cut of my lane, and a clause I had read six times without believing.

Any child of the union belongs to the giving pack.

The third page had a line at the bottom for my signature.

I had written the word declined across it in black ink and sent it back.

Winifred had not accepted the answer.

She had sent me an invitation to a garden party instead, to celebrate an engagement.

Guest of honor, it said.

I had gone to refuse her to her face.

I told myself that was all.

I had known her name from the paper.

I had not known what her face would do when she was brave.

I did not take her to bed because of a pact.

I took her because she walked into my room with her hair wet and told me to say her name again.

And at five in the morning, I looked down at her sleeping on my shoulder and saw the two grey-vested wolves in the hotel car park below the window.

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