My Mate Rejected Me as Wolfless, Then My White Wolf Woke novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Silver in the Yard

Corbin chains Briony in silver on the lawn while Rafe orders her kept there until her heart stops; her white wolf breaks the chains and cracks the ground, and the exiled Ewan waits in the trees.

I made it to the bottom of the porch steps before the first warrior stepped in front of me.

I knew him by sight.

He had been a pup at the lodge gates when I left, and now he had shoulders and a pack pin and didn't meet my eyes.

"Alpha's orders," he said. "Nobody leaves the grounds tonight."

"I'm not a prisoner. I'm going to find a cab."

"Briony."

Corbin came down the steps behind me with two more men and a canvas bag.

My brother had never once in my life used my full name unless something was wrong.

"Don't make this ugly," he said. "Rafe wants you where he can see you until the party's over."

"He rejected me, Corbin. He doesn't get to see me."

"It's not that simple."

"Then say what it is."

He opened the bag instead.

The silver chain inside was as thick as my thumb, and it made a dry hiss when it hit the gravel.

I stared at it.

My own brother had brought silver to a birthday.

"You were ready," I said. "Before I even landed, you had that in the truck."

"It's for your own good," Corbin said.

He said it fast, with his eyes on the bag.

"Take her arms."

The two warriors caught me by the elbows, and I fought them.

I was five foot six and had never shifted in my life, so I lost.

Corbin wrapped the chain around my wrists, and the silver bit into my skin, and I screamed.

They pushed me down onto my knees in the gravel in front of the lodge.

The doors behind us opened, and the whole pack came out onto the porch.

Phones again.

Carys stood in the middle of the porch with her hands over her mouth.

Rafe came out last, and he didn't hurry.

He looked at me kneeling there, burned and shaking, and he nodded once.

"Keep her chained until her heart stops," he said. "Then call it a fall."

I heard him say it clearly.

Everybody on that porch heard him say it clearly, and nobody objected.

That was the moment I stopped being afraid of them.

Something in my chest rolled over, hot and enormous, and I felt it look through my eyes.

I said, "No."

It didn't come out in my voice.

The mark on my neck had gone cold and dead, and underneath it, a different heat began.

It rose up my spine and down my arms and into my wrists, and the silver started to smoke.

The warrior holding my left elbow yelled and let go.

The gravel under my knees cracked in a line that ran out to the porch steps and split the bottom stair in half.

White light ran under my skin, bright enough to throw my shadow across the whole yard.

The chain snapped.

It fell in two pieces and lay hissing on the stones, and my wrists were red and raw and healing as I watched.

Nobody on that porch had a phone up anymore.

A hundred wolves had taken a step back at once.

Corbin had both hands raised, and his face had gone white.

"Briony," he said. "Bri, wait. Wait."

I stood up.

My legs held.

The warrior behind me dropped to one knee without anyone telling him to, and that frightened me more than the light did.

Rafe came down one step, slow.

"Take her," he said to the pack. "Now. Before it settles."

Nobody moved.

I turned and walked.

I walked straight past the garage and the last of the cars and into the dark where the lawn gave way to the trees, because I didn't have anywhere else.

The light under my skin faded to a glow, and my knees started to shake.

I made it twenty yards into the pines before I had to put my hand on a trunk.

"That way is the river," a man said from the dark.

I spun around.

He stepped out between two trees with his hands low and open, in a canvas work jacket, with a scar through his left eyebrow I remembered.

The last time I saw him he had been standing at the lodge gate at three in the morning, watching my taxi leave.

"Ewan?" I said.

Carys had written me that he'd gone rogue.

She had written it in a sweet little email with a smiley face on the end.

"You can't stay on this land," Ewan Doyle said. "Your scent is lit up, and every wolf in the valley has it by now."

"Why should I trust you?"

"You shouldn't. My truck's on the logging road. Come anyway."

I looked back at the lodge.

Rafe was standing on the gravel at the edge of the light, not moving, looking straight at me.

"Why do you care?" I asked.

Ewan's jaw tightened.

"Rafe exiled me three years ago," he said. "For saying this would happen."

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