I Married the Alpha They Threw Away novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: North Shore

Bram puts the Alpha on the floor, the Luna casts Neve out with nothing but the ring on her neck, and at midnight Corbin's challenge is nailed to the camp gate: 28 days, and Bram hasn't shifted in six years.

Corbin reached me before the glass had finished falling.

He caught my arm above the elbow and yanked me around so hard my teeth clicked.

"You're sick," he said, smiling for the room. "It's the bond. She doesn't know what she's saying."

His fingers dug in to the bone.

I knew those fingers.

"Let go of me," I said.

"You're coming home."

Bram's hand closed over his brother's wrist.

That was all he did.

He closed his hand, and Corbin's fingers sprang open.

Then the Alpha of the Saranac pack was on his back on the floorboards beside a dead deer.

Nobody breathed.

Bram hadn't hit him.

He'd just put him down.

Corbin's Beta started forward and stopped when Bram looked at him.

"She bit me," Bram said mildly. "That makes her my wife. Touch her again and I'll take the hand."

Corbin scrambled up red to the hairline.

Behind me, a young wolf snorted and turned it into a cough.

Imogen came down the aisle with a napkin wrapped around her bleeding palm.

She didn't look at Bram.

She looked at me with wet, loving eyes.

"Well," she said. "The law is the law."

She raised her voice for the hall.

"Our Neve has made her choice. Let the outcasts have each other."

"Of course," she added softly, "a wife lives under her husband's roof. Your things will stay here, sweetheart. They were bought with this family's money."

So I left the Kingsbury house the way I'd come to it.

With nothing but the clothes I was in and the little silver ring on a cord around my neck.

The one they said had been in my basket.

The north shore camp was five log cabins and a woodpile at the end of a dirt track.

Bram parked the truck and sat there with the engine ticking.

Behind the cabins, black stone walls stuck up out of the frost.

"You can still go back," he said. "Tell them you lost your head. My stepmother will forgive you by breakfast."

"No."

"You don't even like me."

"I don't know you."

"That's my point."

He got out, came around, and opened my door.

The big cabin smelled of woodsmoke and coffee and venison stew.

A dozen people sat around a long plank table, and every one of them stopped chewing.

An old man with one eye and a dishcloth over his shoulder.

A gray-haired widow with a ladle.

A young man with a leg brace, holding a socket wrench like a fork.

I knew some of their faces.

I'd watched the pack throw them out, one by one, and I'd never said a word.

"This is Neve," Bram said. "She married me about forty minutes ago."

The one-eyed man looked me up and down.

"On purpose?"

"Yes," I said.

"Huh." He shoved a bowl across the table at me. "Sit, then. You're letting the heat out."

I sat.

The stew was the best thing I'd eaten in two lives.

Nobody asked me why.

They argued about a carburetor instead, and whose turn it was on the woodpile, and whether Bram had finally lost his mind.

"He had it to lose?" the widow said.

The young man with the brace laughed so hard he choked.

Afterward he showed me the back room.

One bed, a patchwork quilt, a hook on the door, a window full of black lake.

"It's yours," he said. "I'll take the chair by the stove."

"You don't have to."

"I've slept in it most nights for six years. It's a good chair."

He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed.

"Here's the deal," he said. "You needed a claim to stay in the pack. You've got one."

"Nobody here will bother you. In a month, when Corbin's cooled off, you find somewhere better to be."

"And you get what?"

"My dinner in peace."

I looked at the black scar showing above his collar.

The veins in it had pulled back a finger's width since the hall.

He saw me looking and buttoned his shirt to the top.

"Your eyes went gold," I said.

"Trick of the light."

"Your brother's on his back next to a dead deer, and that was a trick of the light?"

The corner of his mouth moved.

It wasn't a smile, but it lived nearby.

"Go to sleep, Neve Larch."

"Kingsbury," I said. "Apparently."

He turned away, but not before I saw it again.

A thin ring of gold around the amber, there and gone.

I didn't lie down.

I sat on the quilt in my green dress and watched the clock on the wall.

"He'll send his Beta," I said through the door. "Before midnight."

"Who will?"

"Your brother. With a hammer."

Bram didn't answer.

At eleven fifty-two, headlights swung across the window.

Then a hammer, loud and fast, on the wood of the camp gate.

I was out the door before Bram was out of his chair.

The truck was already pulling away, its taillights red in the dust.

A sheet of heavy paper was nailed to the gate, stamped with the Alpha's seal.

Bram read it over my shoulder with a lantern.

At the Hunter's Moon, in twenty-eight days, in the quarry circle, Corbin Kingsbury would fight Bram Kingsbury.

Wolf against wolf, for the return of his fated mate.

The one-eyed man had come out behind us in his socks.

He looked at the paper.

Then he looked at Bram.

"Boy," he said quietly, "you haven't shifted in six years."

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