Hunted by the Alpha novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Mine

Corwin has seen the child, the argument he has waited six years to have breaks open on the lawn, and Sherman's car turns into the street.

I told Joss to stay with Hettie and locked the bedroom door behind me.

Then I went down three flights of stairs in my socks and out the back.

The alley was wet and empty.

On the fire escape landing, there was only a man now, sitting on the iron steps in his gray henley, elbows on his knees.

He looked up when I came out.

He did not look like a hunter anymore.

He looked like someone who had been hit with something he was still trying to name.

"How old is she?" he said.

"I told you. She's my niece."

"How old, Marin."

It was the first time he had said my name.

It went through me, and I hated that too.

"Five," I said.

"Five years and some months."

"Don't."

"Six years and three months ago, there was a storm, and my father was dying upstairs."

He said it quietly, almost gently.

"I counted it on the drive. I counted it three times so I wouldn't be a fool."

"She is not yours."

"She smells like my mother's house."

I opened my mouth, and I could not find one useful word.

He stood up.

He was taller than I remembered, or I was smaller, or the six years had stretched out between us.

"I stood at that window for twenty minutes," he said. "She has my father's chin. She has the scar line over her left eyebrow that I got in the fire at the lodge."

"She hasn't got a scar."

"It's a shadow. It shows when she sleeps. You've never seen it?"

I had. I had put my finger on it a hundred times and called it a crease from the pillow.

My legs went out from under me, and I sat down hard on the bottom step.

He crouched in front of me, close enough that I could smell rain and cedar and him.

"Did you know?" His voice shook. "Before you ran. Did you know you were carrying her?"

"No."

"When did you know?"

"Two days after I ran. I'd been feverish and bleeding for a week, and I thought I was dying."

"And then?"

"A clinic nurse in Wisconsin said the word pregnant, and I threw up in her sink."

His eyes closed for a second.

When they opened again, they were gold all the way across.

"You could have called."

"And said what? Hello, I'm the girl who stole your father's last dose of medicine, and I'm having your baby?"

His whole body went still.

"So you admit it," he said.

"I took it. I was sick, I was pregnant, and I took it. I've been waiting six years for somebody to come and tell me what I did."

"You killed my father."

The words fell between us.

I made myself look straight at him.

"Yes," I said. "I believe I did."

He didn't hit me, and he didn't shout.

He stood up very slowly and turned his back and put both hands on the iron rail until the knuckles went white.

A long time passed.

A garbage truck rumbled three streets over.

"I hunted you for six years," he said, with his back to me. "I told myself I'd put you in front of the council myself."

"I know."

"Then I came here tonight and saw a little girl through a window with her mouth open, snoring."

His shoulders shook once.

"I don't know what to do with that," he said.

"Neither do I."

"I'm not going to take her."

I was on my feet before I knew it.

"You are not taking her," I said. "Over my dead body, Corwin. I mean that. I am a medical student, and I know exactly where to put a needle."

That, finally, made him turn around.

The corner of his mouth twitched, just barely, the way it used to in the dark of the lodge pantry.

"You would too," he said.

"Yes."

"Good." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Good. Because she's going to need someone like that."

"Why?"

"Pack law."

He took a breath.

"An alpha who sires a half-blood pup has to present it to the council. If the council judges the pup unfit, it can be put out of the territory. If it's put out, and it's sick..."

He did not finish.

I knew how that sentence ended.

"Then you will say nothing to anyone," I said.

"I can't hide her forever."

"You can hide her tonight."

"I can." His eyes were steady now. "And I can move you both to the lodge under my own roof, as my physician and her niece. Where I can see anyone who comes near."

"You mean where you can watch us."

"I mean where I can keep her alive."

I looked at him for a long time.

I wanted to say no, and I wanted to say it with a knife in my hand.

But the clock inside me, the one that counted her months between doses, was ticking louder than my pride.

"Thirty days," I said. "And you never touch her without me in the room."

"Agreed."

"And you tell no one that she's yours."

"No one will hear it from me," he said.

Headlights swung into the mouth of the alley.

Not his SUV.

A long silver sedan, polished, slow, with an old pack crest on the plate.

The driver's window slid down, and a man with silver at his temples smiled out at us.

"Corwin," said Sherman Draycott. "I heard you caught a thief."

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