Chapter 18: Three Days, Answered

I let go of his throat and stepped off.

Lucan lay in the snow and did not get up.

Then he shifted back, because he had nothing left to hold the wolf with, and he was a man on his back with no shirt and no strength.

Joss was beside me before I had finished changing.

He wrapped his coat around my shoulders and I leaned on him with my torn shoulder, bleeding on the canvas.

The eldest came to the middle of the ring.

"The white wolf of the Wray line has put the Alpha on his back," he said. "What does the Alpha say?"

Lucan turned over onto his hands and knees.

It took him three tries.

Then he knelt up in the snow, in front of two packs.

"Val."

"I'm Valerie Wray," I said.

His mouth worked.

"Valerie. Wray." He swallowed. "Let me stay. I'll serve you. I'll be your Beta, your guard, anything you name. I won't ask for the seat."

"You'd serve me."

"I'll mark you." His voice cracked. "Tonight. In front of all of them. You can be my Luna and sit at my side."

A murmur ran down the lines, low and disbelieving.

I looked at the man who had held my hand in the infirmary and smiled at the door.

I had pictured this on a hundred nights in the cottage past the garages.

The pictures had been better than this.

He was only a man with his knees in the snow, begging for something he had already lost.

"You said three days," I said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start This Time, I Won't Beg for His Mark from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.