His Mate, Her Choice novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: White Wolf

I took off my shoes first, because my hands needed something to do.

Then I stood on the bare boards in the middle of the oak hall and tried to call my wolf.

Nothing came.

On the ridge it had come up out of me before I could think, with the cold and the snow and Dain running beside me.

Here there was only a long room full of faces.

Two hundred of them, and five old Alphas, and Halvard watching me.

"She has no wolf," Halvard said softly. "Look at her."

I shut my eyes.

I thought of the cellar and the oil lamp, and the cup of tea going into the dust behind my desk, night after night.

I thought of the boy with the bread, in a silver collar.

I thought of my father kneeling on a floor I would never see, and a man putting a knife into him anyway.

It did not come as fear.

It came as anger, clean and slow, and it started under my ribs.

My skin tightened.

"There," said the Alpha on the right, very low.

The burn went up my spine and down my arms.

I heard my own breath change, and the boards under my bare feet turned cold and sharp with grain.

I dropped to my hands, and my bones moved.

It hurt, as it had on the ridge, and it was also a relief so large I almost cried out.

When I opened my eyes, the hall had grown tall around me.

Every scent in it came at once.

Pine smoke and wool and cold iron. Two hundred wolves, and one of them, to my left, that I would have known in the dark.

I shook myself.

My fur was white, all of it, from the tips of my ears to the end of my tail.

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