The Alpha Rejected Her at Midnight, Then the Land Chose Her novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Say It
On the mountain road Lachlan demands she say the word while Vivian and Orson arrive with a lumber-truck driver watching. Both of them go down when he walks away, and Rowena wakes in his truck with the pain gone.
Lachlan Kerr stopped three steps from her, which was as close as he could stand to come.
She could see him fighting for each breath.
"Say it," he said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Rowena. Say Accepted."
"You walked down a mountain at dawn, bleeding, to ask me for that?"
"I drove."
"Wonderful. Then you can drive back."
His jaw worked.
Hester had stepped in front of Rowena, small and white-haired, and he did not look at her.
"I can't shift," he said. "I can't eat or sleep."
"I coughed up half a pint at my own Council fire. You know why."
"Because you rejected me."
"Because you won't close it."
"You said it in front of a hundred and fifty wolves, Alpha."
"I think you can stand the sound of it a bit longer."
His hand tightened on her iron-wood disc until his knuckles went white.
"You want a reason," he said. "Fine. My father was mated by the Moon to my mother."
"When she died, he stopped eating for a year. Then he walked into the river."
Rowena said nothing.
"I was twenty-two. I swore nobody would ever rule me like that."
"Not a bond, not a scent, not a stranger on my fire."
"A stranger," Rowena said. "I carried your tea to you when you had the flu."
"You were a girl who fetched things."
The word landed hard.
A girl who fetched things. She felt Hester's fingers dig into her arm.
"Then it should be easy," Rowena said. "I'm nobody. Walk away."
"I would, if I could."
Behind him, two vehicles came up the road in a spray of gravel.
The first was Orson Crowe's pickup, with three of his men standing in the bed.
The second was a delivery van from the lumber yard.
It slowed so the driver could stare.
Vivian was out of the cab before it had stopped rolling.
She ran straight to Rowena with a wool coat held open in both hands.
"Oh, honey. Look at you. You're frozen."
She wrapped the coat around Rowena's shoulders and rubbed her arms.
For one second Rowena nearly cried from plain relief.
"I've been sick about it all night," Vivian said. "Lachlan's sick. Everybody's sick. You don't have to be a hero."
"Say the word, and you can come home to our house. Nothing changes but the word."
"Nothing changes," Rowena repeated.
"Not a single thing. I promise."
"That is exactly right," Orson said, climbing down from the truck.
He looked at Lachlan's shirt.
"Alpha, you are in no state. We take you back, the Council deals with her, and the girl will see sense."
"I'm not done."
"You are. Get in the truck."
Lachlan looked at Rowena one last time.
Then he turned and walked toward the pickup, thirty paces, forty.
At thirty, Rowena felt the first pull in her chest.
At forty, it became a hook.
She doubled over. Her knees hit the road and the coat slid off her shoulders.
"Stop walking," Hester said sharply. "Boy, stop walking."
Lachlan made it to the pickup's door.
His hand closed on the handle, and then his legs gave out.
He hit the asphalt on his side and curled up.
A sound came out of him that Rowena had never heard from a man.
She was on the ground too. She did not remember falling.
It was in her ribs, in her teeth, in the roots of her hair.
The lumber van driver was shouting into a phone.
"See?" Vivian cried.
She was kneeling beside Rowena again, her hands trembling.
"It's killing you both. Say it, Rowena, please, before one of you dies."
"Say it," Orson said.
Two of his men had Lachlan by the arms and were trying to lift him.
Lachlan fought them. His eyes were on Rowena across the road, wide and black.
"Let me go," he said. "Let go of me."
"Alpha, you can't."
"I said let me go."
He tore free and crawled.
He crawled on his hands and knees across forty feet of frozen road.
His own Beta and the lumber driver watched him do it, and nobody stopped him.
Rowena watched him come.
She could have said it. It was right there behind her teeth, and it would end this.
"No," she whispered.
It was not for him.
It was for Hester, who had said never, and for the part of her that would not be anyone's convenient ending.
The dark came up over her from the edges.
The last thing she felt was a hand closing hard around her wrist.
She woke with the smell of pine smoke and leather in her nose.
She was lying across the bench seat of a truck with a man's coat over her, and a heater roaring.
Her wrist was in someone's fist.
The tearing in her chest was gone.
It was simply gone, and what was left was a warm, heavy quiet that felt safe, which she hated.
She turned her head.
Lachlan Kerr sat behind the wheel with his eyes shut and his hand wrapped around her wrist.
He was breathing evenly for the first time all night.
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