Alpha Hayley's Destined Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: No Brakes
Hayley wins her race with a cut brake line, puts her cousin Cleve on his knees in front of the pack, and gets challenged for her seat; then the man she blames for her father's death walks in and says the scars on her back are his.
On the last lap of the feature, my brake pedal went all the way to the floor.
I was leading by half a car length going into turn one.
Three thousand people were on their feet in the grandstand.
I pressed the pedal again. Nothing. It sank.
The wall was coming at me at ninety miles an hour.
I grabbed second gear and let the engine scream.
The back end kicked out, and I let it.
My right rear kissed the concrete and threw a shower of sparks over the fence.
I came out of turn two sideways, still in front.
The red #44 was on my bumper. Cleve, my cousin. He'd been there all night.
I didn't touch the pedal again. I drove the last half lap on the throttle and the wall.
The checkered flag came down over my hood.
I rolled to a stop at the far end of the pit road by dragging my left side along the tire barrier.
When I climbed out of the car, my legs were shaking so hard I had to hold the roof.
Myra got to me first, her ball cap on backward and her glasses fogged.
"You were sideways in two. You've never been sideways in two in your life."
"I had no brakes."
She stopped grinning.
I lay down in the clay and slid under the car.
The brake line had been cut almost through. Clean. One pass with a blade, just enough to hold for fifty laps.
I came out with the line in my fist and dirt in my braids.
The pit lot was full of my people.
Most of the Kern River pack works this track on Saturday nights. Tow trucks, concessions, the gate, the pits.
Forty of them had come over to slap my back.
They went quiet when they saw my face.
I held the line up so all of them could see it.
"Who touched my car?"
Nobody spoke.
Then Cleve pulled off his helmet and laughed.
He's a big man, blond buzz cut, a neck like a fence post.
"Maybe your crew's getting sloppy, cousin. Girl crew, girl car."
Myra started toward him. I put my hand on her arm.
I walked over to Cleve until I was close enough to smell him.
Brake fluid. Sharp and sweet, all over his right hand.
"You cut it."
"Prove it."
I didn't need to prove it. I'm his Alpha.
"Kneel," I said.
The word went through every wolf in that lot.
Cleve's knees hit the clay.
His face went dark red. He fought it. His whole body shook with fighting it.
He stayed down.
"You're off my crew," I said. "You're off my pit road. You don't touch a car on this track again."
Somebody whistled low behind me.
Then a slow clap started, and I knew whose hands it was before I turned.
My uncle Lon stood by his Cadillac in a pearl-snap shirt and his good bolo tie.
He had a leather book under his arm.
The Charter. Our pack's law, kept since 1880-something. I hadn't seen it out of the clubhouse safe since my father's funeral.
"That's real pretty, Hayley," Lon said. "Your daddy would be proud."
"Get your son off my pit road, Uncle Lon."
"Oh, I will. But first, a little housekeeping."
He opened the book on the hood of his car.
"An Alpha who stands unmated at the Harvest Moon of her second year," he read, "shall answer a blood challenge of the founding line."
He looked up at me.
"That's four weeks, sweetheart. You got a mate I don't know about?"
Some of the pack laughed. Not many.
Cleve got up off his knees. My voice had let him go when I stopped looking at him.
He wiped the clay off his jeans.
"I challenge," he said. "Founding line. In the ring. In wolf form."
He grinned at me with all his teeth.
Myra's hand closed on my wrist.
She's the only one who knows.
I haven't been able to shift since the night my father died.
Two years. Not a whisker. Not a claw.
If I stepped into that ring with Cleve, I'd step in on two legs. He'd tear my throat out in front of everyone, and the pack would have to call it law.
"Well?" Lon said. "You going to answer him, Alpha?"
I opened my mouth.
Then the wind turned, and I smelled him.
Cedar and engine oil and cold mountain water.
The three old scars on my back went hot, like someone had laid a hand over them.
Every wolf in the pit lot turned toward the gate.
A man was walking in from the dark.
Black hair, messy from the wind. A white shirt open at the throat. A thin silver chain.
He was taller than anyone on my pit road, and he didn't look at any of them.
He looked at me.
Inside my chest, something that had been asleep for two years lifted its head.
It spoke with absolute certainty:
Mate.
I knew his face. Every wolf in that lot knew his face.
Torrey Ossler. Alpha of the Greenhorn pack.
He and his brother Roddy built half the fast cars in this valley, and nobody on my side of the mountain would buy one.
The man whose scent was all over me when I woke up on the riverbank beside my father's body.
"Ossler," Lon said, very softly. "You've got some nerve."
Torrey didn't even glance at him.
He stopped an arm's length from me. My firesuit was tied at my waist, and my tank top left my shoulder bare.
His gray eyes went to the scars.
Three long silver lines across my shoulder blade.
Something moved in his face, and it wasn't triumph. It looked like grief.
"Those scars on your back," he said quietly, "are mine."
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