I Don't Come Back to My Alpha Again novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Silver

Joelle asks Coral in front of everyone where the scars went, gets shut in a storeroom, and walks out of the Pack House at night to her father's cabin, where Beck is waiting on the porch.

I couldn't stop looking at her arms.

Coral let go of Tobin and smoothed his hair, the way I used to.

He let her.

"Coral," I said.

She turned to me with her sweet public smile. "Welcome home, Jo."

"Where did your scars go?"

The hall went very quiet.

The kitchen girl stopped breathing. The old butler looked at the ceiling.

"I'm sorry?" Coral said.

"The silver scars. Both arms, both shoulders. You showed them to the whole council." I kept my voice level. "Silver doesn't heal. So where did they go?"

For one second her smile slipped.

Then it was back, wider than before.

"There's a clinic in Denver," she said. "They do wonderful things now. Skin grafts, lasers. It took three years and every penny I had." She touched her own shoulder like it still hurt. "I didn't want Tobin to have to look at what you did to me every morning."

Tobin glared at me. "Are you serious right now? You're asking her that?"

"I'm asking a question."

"You don't get to ask her anything."

"Enough." Ansel's voice cracked across the hall like a belt. "Joelle's had a long day. Put her in the room off the kitchen."

The butler blinked. "The storeroom, Alpha?"

"There's a cot in it, isn't there?"

There was.

There was also a mop bucket and four sacks of flour and a window the size of a book.

The butler carried my bag in, which was nothing, because I had nothing.

He set it on the cot and didn't meet my eyes.

"I'm sorry, miss," he said, and left.

I sat down on the cot.

Through the wall I could hear dinner being laid in the dining room.

Coral's laugh. Ansel's low voice. A plate set down for Tobin, in his old chair, at his old place.

Nobody set one down for me.

I got up and went upstairs anyway.

Tobin's door was the third on the left. It had a basketball hoop screwed to the back of it now.

I knocked.

"Tobin. It's me."

Silence.

"I just want to look at you. Five minutes."

"Go away."

"I brought you something."

I had. A smooth white stone from the stream in the forbidden grounds, the one place up there the water ran clean. I had carried it in my pocket for four years.

The door opened two inches.

His pale gray eyes looked down at the stone in my palm.

"That's a rock," he said.

"I know."

"I'm fifteen. What am I supposed to do with a rock?"

He shut the door in my face.

I heard the lock turn.

I stood in the hallway holding the stone until I couldn't feel my fingers.

Then I went back down to the storeroom and sat on the cot in the dark and thought about my father.

He had a scar on his left forearm, a white ridge as long as my finger.

A hunter's silver blade, when he was twenty-two.

When I was little, I used to trace it while he read to me.

"Why doesn't it go away, Daddy?"

"Silver doesn't forget, Jo. Nothing a wolf does can make it heal."

Thirty years.

It was still there on the day we buried him.

No clinic in Denver did that.

I stood up.

The wound in my arm had stiffened, and I flexed my hand until it hurt enough to wake me.

The house was asleep by eleven.

I walked out through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the front entry.

The oak doors were heavy, but I pulled one open.

"Where do you think you're going?"

Ansel was on the landing in a robe, with a glass of whiskey.

"Out."

"You're on parole." He started down the stairs. "You stay where I put you. One word from me and the council sends you right back up that valley."

"My parole says I stay in Red Moon territory." I didn't turn around. "My father's cabin is in Red Moon territory. Last I checked, it's mine."

"That place is a ruin. The roof's half gone."

"Then I'll fix it."

"Joelle."

I walked out into the night.

He didn't follow me.

He wouldn't have known how. Ansel had never walked anywhere in his life that his car could take him.

The ridge road climbed through the pines for two miles.

My legs were strong. Five years of climbing out of caves had seen to that.

My arm was not.

By the time I saw the clearing, my sleeve was wet again and my teeth were chattering.

I stopped at the edge of the trees.

The cabin should have been dark.

It had been empty for six years, since my father died.

But there was a light in the window.

And there was smoke coming out of the chimney.

Somebody was sitting on the front porch steps, a big shape in a flannel shirt, with a first-aid kit open on his knees.

He looked up when he heard me.

It was Beck Lassiter.

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