The Body-Swapped Heiress Returns as the Alpha's Mate novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not Odette

Mathias takes her for the mate who ran; she names the trap he escaped and he believes her. Darren texts: the wedding is on the full moon.

I did not run.

Odette's legs would not have carried me far, and the wolf was not the kind of thing you outran.

"I'm Valerie Redfern," I said out loud, because it was the only true thing I had.

The wolf stopped.

The silver light in my wrist went on burning, steady now, and the cold air smelled of pine and woodsmoke and something warm under both.

"Valerie Redfern is a tall woman with gold eyes," the voice said in my head. "You are a girl who weighs nothing."

"I'm in my cousin's body. It's a long story and I don't have time for it."

The wolf's shape bent and stretched in the moonlight.

It was over in a few breaths.

A man stood on the gravel where the animal had been, bare to the waist, in a pair of work trousers he must have left in the road.

He was very tall.

His hair was black and his beard was short, and his left ear had a notch cut out of the top.

I had seen that notch before.

I had been seventeen, kneeling in the dark by the river with my father's bolt cutters, and the notch had been fresh then and bleeding.

"You're lying," the man said.

His real voice was lower than the one in my head, and rougher.

"Maybe," I said. "Ask me something only I would know."

He took a step closer, and I felt the pull in my wrist stretch out toward him.

I did not like it.

I did not understand it, and I did not like anything I did not understand tonight.

"Who are you?" I asked him.

"Mathias Crowe. Alpha of this side of the river."

I had known it, of course.

Every Redfern child knew the name of the man across the water.

"Then you won't enjoy hearing this," I said. "Seven years ago, in October, someone left an iron trap in the reeds below the old fish weir. It caught a wolf by the ear and the leg."

His face went still.

"The wolf was young and howling so loudly that it brought a Redfern patrol down the bank," I said. "A girl got there first. She told the wolf to keep quiet, cut the chain, and held the jaws open with a tire iron while it pulled itself out."

"Stop."

"The wolf bit her sleeve and ran. She went home and told her father she had torn her jacket on a fence."

Mathias did not move.

"She left her scarf behind," I said. "It was red wool, and it had an R stitched into the corner."

For a long moment the only sound was the river.

Then he put two fingers inside the pocket of his trousers and drew out a strip of red cloth so worn that the stitching had gone grey.

He held it out to me flat on his palm.

My throat closed.

"I carried it for seven years," he said. "I have never shown it to anyone."

I did not take it.

My hands were shaking too hard.

"How do you know that?" he said, and his voice had changed. "Nobody knows that. I took the scarf in my teeth before the patrol got there. I never said a word."

"Because it was me."

He looked at the strip of wool, and then at the silver line on my wrist, and then at my face.

Odette's face. Thin cheeks, dark hair, grey eyes that were not mine.

"I don't know that face," he said.

"I don't know it either. I've been wearing it for four days."

He stepped closer.

Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him in the cold night.

He did not touch me.

He lifted my left wrist with the tips of his fingers, gently, and turned it so that the light fell across the mark.

It was a thin silver line in the shape of a crescent. It was warm.

His thumb rested beside it and the line brightened.

"I thought the mark would never come," he said quietly. "Everyone told me I was waiting for a ghost."

"What is it?"

"It's a mate-mark." He said it without looking up. "It only wakes for one person."

"I'm not your mate. I'm engaged."

"Are you?" he said.

His eyes were grey-green and steady, and I could not look away from them.

"I was," I said. "Until an hour ago, when I stood outside a door and heard my fiancé and my brother plan to keep my body for good."

His hand tightened around my wrist, but only a little.

"Tell me all of it."

My phone buzzed against my hip.

I took it out with my free hand.

It was Darren again.

"Where are you? Odette says you left the house in your coat. Stay where you are, love. We can see your tracks, and we're coming to get you. You're ill and you don't know what you're doing."

Another text came in under it, from Jasper.

"Don't talk to any Crowe."

Mathias read the screen over my shoulder.

"How far are they?" he said.

"Twenty minutes. Maybe less."

"Good." He let go of my wrist and turned toward the dark road. "Then we have time to decide what you want me to do when they arrive."

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