Chapter 24: The Challenge

At a hundred and thirty-one, his heart kicked.

Then it ran.

The heat came up out of him so fast I gasped, and Tove's wolf yelped and scrambled off his legs.

The frost went back down his jaw, out of his beard, down his throat.

It stopped at his collarbones.

It didn't go away.

His eyes opened, gold, then gray.

"How long?" he rasped.

"Two minutes and ten seconds."

Tove shifted back at the foot of the bed, naked and furious, and grabbed the quilt off the floor.

"You were dead for two minutes," she said. "In front of your sister. I'm telling Mom."

"Next time it'll be longer," he said.

"Then we decide next time now," I said. "Here. Like we said."

He put his hand on the back of my head.

"Tell me," he said.

"You tell me the second you feel it coming. Not after. Tove sleeps across the hall with her door open."

I put my palm on his chest. "And I don't sleep beside you anymore. I sleep on you."

"That's not a hardship," he said.

"I'm right here," Tove said. "I'm standing right here."

Torvald came back four days later.

He came at noon on Thursday, up the private road, in his dark Buick with two big cars behind it.

He'd been struck off Rask land, and he knew it.

He stopped his car on the county side of the open gate and got out, and he waited for us to come to him.

Half the pack walked down the road behind Vidar, and the council, and his mother in her long gray cardigan.

I walked at Vidar's side in my uniform with Tove on my other side.

Torvald hadn't shaved.

The gray stubble made him look older and meaner.

His dead wife's ring was still on his little finger.

The Marquette Alpha got out of the second car, red beard to his chest.

The Thunder Bay Alpha got out of the third, in his camel coat, and he wouldn't look at me.

"You voted yes," I said to the Thunder Bay Alpha. "Twelve days ago. I was on my knees on that floor."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.