Alpha Hayley's Destined Mate novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The County Line

"We are not," I said.

"Tell that to the forty guys gassing up at the concession stand."

I called Torrey. He picked up on the first ring.

"I know," he said. "Roddy took the call. Half my pack wants to go down and meet them."

"Don't let them."

"I can hold mine. Can you hold yours?"

I looked out the office window at the pit lot.

Trucks were pulling in that never come on a Friday.

"I don't know," I said.

By nine there were thirty trucks on the canyon road, headlights strung up the switchbacks.

I drove ahead of all of them in my father's truck with Myra beside me.

Halfway up the mountain there's a bend everybody calls the county line.

An old surveyor's sign stands there, bent and full of bullet holes.

Our land stops on one side of it. Theirs starts on the other.

I parked my truck crossways on the road just below the sign and got out.

The Rydell trucks stopped behind me in a long line.

Doors opened. Men and women got out, and some of them were already pulling off their shirts.

Above the sign, in the dark of the pines, the Greenhorn pack was waiting.

There were twenty of them on two legs and more on four, eyes shining in our headlights.

Roddy was in front, bare-chested, with his fists closed.

Torrey stood a step ahead of him.

Lon's white Cadillac was parked at the very back of our line with its engine running.

I didn't see him get out.

"Alpha," one of Lon's coffee friends shouted. "Get out of the road."

"No."

"They killed the grey to shut him up! Your own uncle said so!"

"My uncle says a lot of things," I said. "Where is he? Why's he sitting in his car?"

Nobody answered that.

I walked out into the middle of the road, onto the line, between the two packs.

The scars on my back were burning, the way they always do when he's close.

"Torrey Ossler," I said. "Come down here."

He came down the road alone and stopped an arm's length from me.

"Every one of you has an opinion about this man," I said, loud, to my side of the road.

"You think he killed my father. Then you thought he killed the grey."

"Some of you think I'm sleeping with a murderer and I've lost my mind."

A few of them looked at their boots.

"I'm not asking anybody's permission tonight," I said. "There's no challenge to dodge."

"I already won it, on four legs, in front of all of you."

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