Bearing the Ruthless Alpha's Twins novel · Chapter 1 of 1
Chapter 1: The Locker
Torin mocks Ingrid in front of his pack until his girlfriend Briony kisses him quiet and kindly invites Ingrid to the lake house party; at the door Torin is waiting alone.
Torin slammed my locker shut with his palm, and the whole hallway turned to watch.
His pack came in behind him.
They were tall and loud, and they were laughing before he had said a word.
"Look who finally showed up," Torin said.
He leaned his shoulder on the next locker and took a strand of my hair between two fingers.
He wound it around his finger slowly, so everyone could see him do it.
I stood still and kept my books against my chest.
At our college there are two kinds of students.
There are the wolves, who shift at sixteen and run the campus, and there is me.
I was nineteen and my wolf had never come.
The pack gave me a charity place in the dorms and a seat in the back of every class, and Torin gave me his attention.
He was twenty and the pack Alpha's only son, and for two years I had been the thing he did between classes.
"What did you do last night, Ingrid?" he asked.
"Did you finish another stack of library books?"
His friends laughed on cue.
One of them wiped his eyes and leaned on his friend.
Torin let go of my hair and tapped the frame of my glasses.
They were black, and they were too big for my face, and I had worn them since I was seven.
"Seriously, how many books can one person read before she grows into those?" he said.
"Just leave me alone, Torin."
I said it to the locker, not to him.
He stepped closer.
His shoulder was almost against mine, and his scent was mint and cut wood and something heavier I could never name.
My hands were always cold, even in summer.
Standing next to him, they went warm.
They did it every time he came within arm's reach, and I hated that they did.
I put them in my sleeves so he wouldn't see.
A boy at the back of his pack said, "She does look like a librarian who lost her library."
Torin smiled at that.
He opened his mouth to say the next thing.
Then a hand with a gold bracelet slid around his neck, and Briony Sterne pulled his head down and kissed him.
She was the head cheerleader and the Beta's daughter, and everyone had known for a year that she would be his Luna.
She kissed him for a long time.
The pack whooped, and Torin lost whatever he had been about to say.
When she let go, she patted his chest and said, "Go, you're late for practice."
He looked at me over her shoulder.
It was a short look, and I could not read it.
Then his friends pulled him away down the hall, and the crowd broke up behind them.
My hands were shaking, so I shut my eyes for a second.
"Hey," Briony said.
She was standing at my elbow with her head tilted and her bag on her shoulder.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You're not, and he's a jerk," she said.
"He does it to everyone he thinks is too quiet to fight back, and I'm sorry I didn't stop him sooner."
I had never heard her say a full sentence to me before.
I did not know what to do with it.
"Thank you," I said.
"Come on, I'll walk you to class."
She took my arm, and we walked.
She asked what I was reading and said she'd never made it through a whole book.
She laughed at herself, and I laughed too, the first time that week.
At the door of my classroom she stopped.
"There's a party at the Wolcott lake house tonight," she said.
"Everyone's going. You should come, and I'll stay with you the whole time so nobody bothers you."
"I'm not really invited to things."
"You are now," Briony said.
"Give me your number and I'll send you the address, and I'll meet you at the door."
I should have asked why a girl like her wanted to help me.
But no one had offered to meet me anywhere in two years.
I typed my number into her phone.
She smiled, said, "See you at eight," and was gone down the hall.
I stood in the doorway of my class and thought about it.
The smart thing was to go back to the dorm and read.
The smart thing was to never stand within arm's reach of Torin Wolcott again.
So I went to the party.
I wore the only dress I owned that wasn't grey, and I left my glasses on.
The lake house was lit from the inside, and the music reached me from the road.
I walked up the stone path alone and looked for Briony at the door.
She wasn't there.
Someone else was.
Torin stood on the porch step with his hands in his pockets, with no pack and no smirk.
He watched me come all the way up the path.
"You came," he said.
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