The Alpha Hunts Every Runner, and I Took Him Down novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hall

In front of the whole pack Greta fights Orrin's ruling that she fouled the Run, Soren rules her boon stands, and that night she takes him to bed on her terms, until a skidder starts on her father's stand at dawn.

The pack hall smelled of wet wool and old coffee, and every wolf in Kettle Hollow was packed into it by noon.

I stood at the front with Dell at my shoulder and my hands in my pockets so no one would see them shake.

Orrin Dahl laid a ledger on the long table.

"Three hundred and eighty thousand dollars," he said. "Gone from the mill fund in one spring, in the hand of the foreman, Halvorsen."

He turned a page for the crowd.

"Every entry is his."

A murmur ran through the benches.

I knew that handwriting.

I had learned my letters from it, at the kitchen table, at five.

"That's his name," I said, "and that's not his hand."

"You were nineteen, girl. You saw what you wanted to see."

"I watched him sign a hundred timesheets."

"He made his g like a fishhook, and those g's are loops."

Orrin's smile went tight.

"Grief is a poor judge of penmanship."

"Then let someone who knew him judge it." I turned to the benches. "Jorgen."

Jorgen Dahl sat in the third row with his father's chin and none of his father's weight.

We had split a stolen cigarette behind this hall the summer I turned eighteen.

He had kissed me once, badly, and we had both laughed.

He was the treasurer's clerk now.

He'd been twenty-one when the money went missing, and clerking in the same office.

"You kept those books beside him," I said. "Did you ever see my father take a dollar?"

Jorgen looked at his hands.

The hall waited.

"I didn't see anything," he said.

It was a small voice, and it landed in me.

I nodded once.

I didn't trust my mouth.

"The girl broke the Run," Orrin said, riding the silence.

"She laid hands on the Alpha, which is a foul, and the boon is void."

"Void," several voices repeated.

"I move that she be out of the valley by sunset."

My knees went loose with rage.

"That rule is thirty years old, Orrin Dahl," said a dry voice from the back, "and I voted against it."

Every head turned.

Sigrid Brekke, Soren's grandmother, was standing on the last bench in a man's canvas jacket, leaning on a hooked cane.

She barely came up to the shoulders of the wolves beside her.

"Sit down, Sigrid," said Orrin, with the first crack in his voice.

"I'll sit when I've voted," she said.

"I vote no."

She looked at me for a long time, and her pale eyes were exactly her grandson's.

I didn't know why it made my skin prickle.

Soren stepped up beside the table.

"Exile takes four votes of five and my signature," he said.

"You have one vote, and I won't sign."

"Alpha," Orrin began.

"The boon is mine to grant, and I granted it."

"The ledgers open here a week from today at noon, every page, Orrin."

He didn't raise his voice.

He didn't have to.

Two hundred wolves went quiet.

Orrin Dahl closed the ledger with a soft heavy sound.

"As the Alpha wishes," he said, and I saw his eyes flick toward the Stone on the ridge, and then away.

Nobody else did.

I did not go to Soren's lodge that night because I'd forgiven him.

I went because my father's voice had been coming back to me all day.

The lodge sits on the bluff above the mill, a long low house of cedar logs with one window lit.

He opened the door before I knocked.

"I'm not here to talk about the order," I said.

"All right."

"I'm here because I haven't told anyone how he died, and you're the only person in the valley who owes me an ear."

He stepped aside, and I went in.

We sat on the rug in front of the fire, not touching.

I told him about the hospice in McCall and the oxygen line and the spring snow outside the window.

I told him my father hadn't asked for water, or for the doctor, or for me.

He'd said, "Tell them I never touched it," and then he'd said it twice.

I stopped talking.

The fire popped.

When I looked up Soren's eyes were wet and he wasn't hiding it.

"I should have gone and found you both," he said. "I knew where you were. I made myself not look."

"Yes."

"I'll carry that."

"I know you will."

I reached over and took his right hand, and the silver crescent woke in my palm.

"Take your shirt off," I said.

He pulled it over his head in one movement.

His chest was a map of pale old scars, with a silver light in the middle of it.

I put my hand over the place it came from.

Under my palm his heart slammed.

"Greta."

"Lie back."

He lay back on the rug, and I pulled off my flannel and my shirt and my bra and watched him look at me.

"Fuck," he said, soft and awed. "You're perfect."

"Don't talk."

I unbuttoned his jeans and dragged them down with my own, and his cock sprang free, thick and flushed and already wet at the tip.

I wrapped my hand around it, and he groaned.

"You've been hard for me since the creek," I said.

"Since before the creek."

"Good."

I straddled his hips and held him in my fist and rubbed the head through my wetness until we were both shaking.

He gripped my thighs but didn't pull.

"Please," he said.

"Hold still."

I sank down on him an inch at a time.

It burned and stretched, and I braced both hands on his chest and breathed through it while he swore under his breath.

He was big.

He filled me all the way, past anything I'd had before.

I sat on his hips with him buried to the root and my eyes stinging.

"Oh my God," I said.

"You're taking me so well."

"Shut up."

"Greta. Look at you. You're taking all of it."

I rolled my hips and felt every inch of him drag.

I did it again, slow and deep, and he arched under me with his head thrown back and his throat working.

I loved that sight.

I wanted to see him come apart again and again, and I wanted to be the one holding the reins.

I moved faster.

His hands slid up my ribs to my breasts, and when he thumbed my nipples I cried out and clenched around him, and he swore.

"Harder," I said.

He thrust up into me to meet each stroke, and the sound of us filled the room, wet and slapping, loud over the fire.

"That's it," he said. "That's it, take what you need."

"I need you to look at me."

He did.

His eyes were molten gold now, with the wolf right behind them, and he never looked away.

I came with his name caught in my throat, clenching and clenching around his cock, my nails scoring his chest.

He held on through all of it.

"Now," I said, shaking. "Come for me. Now, Soren."

He came with a broken shout, thrusting up deep, his whole body bowed beneath me.

I felt him pulse and spill inside me, hot and endless.

I fell forward onto his chest.

His arms closed around me, very carefully.

He kissed the top of my head.

"I'm not forgiving you," I said into his skin.

"I know."

"I'm just not leaving."

His chest shook, and I realized he was laughing and crying at once.

I fell asleep on him, on the rug, with the fire going down.

A sound woke me before dawn, thin and mechanical and far away.

I knew it better than my own name.

It was the whine of a skidder starting up, down on the creek.

Soren's phone buzzed on the floor beside us.

He read the screen and went very still.

"Greta," he said. "They're cutting your father's stand."

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