My Mate Gambled Me Away to the Lycan King novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Highcrest

At Highcrest Marlo writes her terms, Caius turns her wrist and touches the mark, Winnie arrives with a duffel bag, and Silver Creek calls to say the dying Alpha is asking for her.

I gave him my terms before the car left the Silver Creek lot.

"Twelve months and a day," I said. "Then I walk out the front door and nobody stops me."

"Agreed," Caius said.

"You don't lie to me. About anything."

"Agreed."

"And in front of your court, I'm your guest, not your property. You don't put a hand on me where they can see."

He turned his head and looked at me for a moment.

"Why that one?"

"Because I just spent a morning being a thing people pass around," I said.

His jaw moved, but he nodded.

"Written down tonight," he said. "Signed by both of us."

We did not talk again for forty minutes, while the city fell away and the road climbed into pines.

Highcrest sat at the end of a switchback, a long house of dark timber and glass with a stone wall around it.

Two guards opened the gate without being asked.

I had expected a castle with a dungeon, and instead I got a mudroom with a boot rack.

A woman in a grey cardigan took my coat and told me dinner was at seven and that my room had a lock on the inside.

I looked at Caius.

"I asked for that," he said. "The first week, I'd lock it if I were you."

Then he walked me upstairs himself, and he stopped at the door of a bedroom with a very large bed.

"The stake is a paper," he said. "You are a guest in my house, and I want the mark looked at."

"Why?"

"Because it should have bled."

I thought about saying no.

Then I thought about Dane's face, and the way his eyes had jumped away from my neck.

I pushed my hair over my shoulder.

Caius stepped close and put two fingers under my jaw to turn my head, and the touch was careful and dry and warm.

He did not say anything.

His thumb moved over the mark, slowly, along the line of Dane's teeth.

My skin lifted along my arms.

It had never done that for Dane.

Something low sounded in Caius's chest, the kind of sound a wolf makes without meaning to.

"What was that?" I said.

"Nothing." He took his hand away and pushed it into his pocket. "My wolf doesn't like Dane's scent on you. It's the medicine smell."

"You told me you wouldn't lie."

"I'm not lying. I just haven't figured out the rest of it yet."

I looked at the pale scar through his left eyebrow so that I wouldn't look at his mouth.

"Figure it out faster," I said.

"I'm trying."

A knock came from down the hall, a loud one, and a voice I would have known through a wall called, "I swear to God, if there's a dragon in here I'm taking its hoard!"

Winnie came around the corner dragging a duffel bag with one hand and waving an envelope in the other.

"Tabitha gave me your stuff," she said, out of breath. "She said she's so sorry she couldn't bring it herself, she's got to be at the kitchen for the dinner shift."

"The dinner shift on a Tuesday?"

"I know, I know." Winnie dropped the bag and hugged me hard. "I also kept the thirty grand. Don't tell me I can't, I earned it with my faith."

"You earned it by believing in me," I said. "Spend some of it on a lawyer."

"I'll spend it on you," Winnie said, and then looked at the King, who was still standing there. "Sorry. Your Majesty."

"Caius," he said. "You're staying?"

"If somebody tells me where the snacks are."

He looked at the two of us, and I saw the corner of his mouth lift for the first time.

"Third door on the left, then the pantry," he said. "There's a room next to Marlo's. I'll have it made up."

Winnie stared at him.

"He's nice," she whispered to me, much too loudly. "I hate it."

We ate dinner in a long kitchen with the guard captain and the cardigan woman, and nobody called me a prize.

I signed a page of terms at the end of the table, in blue pen, under his name.

My hand shook a little, and not from fear.

I had just put the pen down when the phone on the wall rang.

The cardigan woman answered it, listened, and held the receiver out to me.

"It's Silver Creek," she said. "A nurse. She says the Alpha is dying, and he won't stop asking for you."

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