From Broke Technician to Luna novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Mine

Outside the club, Tiernan fights a mate's fever and a wolf that has already named her; Ansel Roth calls with a deadline: tell her by Friday what her family was, or he will.

Tiernan's POV

I sat in the back of the car across from Velvet Row with the window down in the cold.

Dane had gone inside to look at her and come back out twice already.

"She's on the dance floor," he said, leaning in at the window. "Her friend is making her do a spin. She's drinking club soda."

"Is she safe?"

"Tiernan, it's a club. Nobody in there could take her cup."

"Is she safe?"

"She's safe."

I nodded and he went back to the sidewalk.

I had been the alpha of the Kincaid pack for eleven years, and I had not once lost an evening to a woman.

Tonight I had lost three hours to a girl who stood five feet tall.

She had opened a laptop in my suite and I had felt it in my teeth.

It wasn't her face, though I'd noticed her face. It was her scent.

Rain on warm stone, and something under it I hadn't smelled since I was ten years old.

The wolf in me had gone quiet and then spoken: Mine.

I did not argue with it, which frightened me more than anything else tonight.

She had wanted a closed door kept open and a rule about the boss kept in force, and I had agreed to both.

I had agreed to her whole list. I'd have agreed to a longer one.

The fever was starting.

I could feel it behind my breastbone, a slow heat that would get worse every day she stayed out of reach.

It was a mate's fever, and I had stopped expecting one years ago.

I looked at the folder on the seat beside me.

It had a plain gray cover. The label on the front said ASHWORTH.

I had carried a copy of it in every car I'd owned since I turned eighteen.

I knew all of it by heart except page nine, which I read less than the others and understood best.

A black sedan rolled past the club, slow, with its back windows tinted dark.

It didn't stop.

It didn't have to.

My phone lit on the seat, a number I had never seen.

I answered it without saying anything.

"You caught my reflection," Ansel Roth said. His voice was dry and unhurried. "I wanted to see whether she would be fast. She was."

"You were in my network."

"I was in a vault you ought to have opened for her years ago."

"Stay away from her."

"That's what I told her tonight. She won't listen to me either. She never does." He sounded almost fond. "She keeps a flip phone, you know. I like that in her."

"What do you want, Roth?"

"I took one folder and I left the rest. You know which one. I made a copy before she cut me off."

I looked at the gray folder.

"Then you know I haven't hurt her."

"I know you haven't told her."

"Tell her by Friday," Roth said. "Tell her what you are, what her family was, and what your name has to do with it. Or I will."

"You don't tell her anything."

"I've sent her one thing every year since she was nine. Ask her about the birthday cards."

He hung up.

I sat with the phone in my fist until the plastic creaked.

Dane opened the door and slid in beside me.

He looked at my face and stopped talking.

"That was Roth," I said.

"Do I need to hurt somebody?"

"Not tonight." I put the phone away. "Tonight you take her home, and you don't let her see you do it."

"She'll notice."

"She notices everything. That's why she'll be a good Luna."

I hadn't meant to say it.

Dane went very still.

"Tiernan, she doesn't know what she is."

"I know."

"She doesn't know what you are."

"I know that too."

"You haven't told her that her family was..."

"Dane."

He shut his mouth.

Through the club's glass doors, I could see her at the end of a corridor in the red light.

She had a phone in her hand, one of the old flip kind.

She was reading something on it, and her face had gone pale.

I had the door open before I thought about it.

Dane's arm landed across my chest.

"Not yet," he said quietly. "You said hands off."

I sat back, and the fever burned behind my ribs, and I let it.

Page nine was in the folder on the seat.

I put my hand flat on the cover so it couldn't open.

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