My Pack Called Me Empty, So the Coldest Alpha Claimed Me Out Loud novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

At her mother's cabin on the point Maija sets three terms and the Alpha agrees to all of them; her father arrives with six wolves to take her home.

My mother's cabin sat at the end of the point, where the pines gave out and the lake began.

It had one room, a woodstove, and a window that faced open water.

She had left it to me when she died, and I had spent seven years pretending I didn't need it.

Tonight I needed it.

I had the stove lit and my boots off when somebody pounded on the door with the flat of a hand.

"It's me," Leena shouted. "Open up, I brought a casserole and questions."

She came in with a covered dish in both arms and snow melting in her black hair.

She put the dish on the table, turned around, and screamed into her fist.

"My mother is already calling it grief-madness!" she said. "She has the whole lower row praying over it!"

"I noticed the staring."

"You walked out on him! In front of Reino Kettunen!"

"I noticed that too," I said.

"I have never been so proud of anyone in my life," Leena said, and burst into tears, and hugged me hard enough to crack a rib.

Leena worked the Longhouse kitchen and had known me since we were six.

She was a wolf, and she was the only person in the pack who had never once said the word empty.

We ate half the casserole standing up.

I was scraping the pan when I heard a truck engine cut out on the gravel.

Leena looked at me with enormous eyes.

"Do you want me to stay?" she whispered.

"Go home, Leena."

"I'll go as far as the pines and listen."

I pointed at the road. "Go home."

She went as far as the pines.

I opened the door.

Eskil was standing on my step with an armload of split birch.

He didn't say anything.

He walked past me and stacked the wood beside my stove, log by log, until the rack was full.

Then he stood in the middle of my tiny room, with his head almost touching the beams, and waited.

"You said at your door," he said.

"I did."

"Then I'm asking," he said.

"Asking what?"

"Whatever you want me to ask."

I looked at him, at the black sweater with its sleeves pushed up and his pale, tired eyes.

I did not believe him, and I wasn't going to pretend I did.

"I have terms," I said.

"Good," I said.

"One. You never use the Alpha voice on me."

"It wouldn't work on you," he said.

"That's not the point. You never try," I said.

"Done."

"Two. This is my cabin, and my door. I decide who comes in, and when."

"Done," he said.

"Three. You don't pay my father, or flatter him, or buy him off for being a bastard to me. I'll handle my father."

He thought about that one longer.

"Done," he said.

I had expected an argument.

I had expected a speech, or a flash of that cold Alpha temper.

He just stood there, agreeing.

"You're not even going to haggle," I said.

"What would I haggle over?"

"I don't know. Normal men bargain."

"I'm not interested in winning this," Eskil said. "I want you to say yes."

"I haven't said anything."

"I know. I've been told I'm bad at waiting."

I almost laughed.

I caught it and swallowed it, because I wasn't done.

"Why me?" I said.

"Because I want to."

"That's not a reason."

He looked at the stove for a moment.

"Three years ago," he said, "the morning after my father's funeral run, you brought coffee out to the cove."

I went still.

I remembered it.

I had been twenty-one, and the Beta's daughter, and no one thought to send a real wolf to carry a thermos.

I had found him alone on the ice edge at dawn.

He had been sitting with his hands hanging between his knees, shaking, and he had not looked like an Alpha.

I had given him the coffee, and I hadn't bowed.

I had sat down on the cold rock beside him until the sun came up, and neither of us had said a word.

"You sat with me," he said. "You didn't ask me for anything."

"You looked like you needed coffee."

"I did. Nobody else brought it."

I stared at him.

It was a lovely thing to say.

It was also exactly what a man would say if he needed a girl who couldn't be a threat to his seat.

"The Accord," I said.

"Is why it's now," Eskil said. "It isn't why it's you."

"That's very convenient."

"It's true."

"I'm very easy to carry around, aren't I?" I said. "No wolf to fight for the seat. No mark to prove. Nobody could say I'd take your pack from you."

His jaw tightened.

"That isn't what I said."

"You didn't have to."

I folded my arms.

"One more thing, Alpha."

"Anything," he said.

"My stovepipe leaks."

He stared at me.

Then he took off his coat, hung it on my chair, went out to his truck for a ladder, and climbed up on my roof in the dark.

I stood in the doorway and listened to him curse at a rusted collar and bang it into place with a hammer.

That was a very strange way to be courted.

I was just telling myself it didn't mean anything when I heard the engines.

Not one truck.

Three of them, coming fast down the point road with their headlights bouncing across the snow.

Eskil came down off the ladder in one move.

My father got out of the lead truck with six wolves behind him.

"Maija," Veikko said, loud and flat. "Get your coat. You're coming home."

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