Married My Alpha's Brother novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The Night Before

"Show me," I said.

"Now?"

"You've been a wolf once in three months. I'm your nurse. Show me."

He looked at the curtains. They were shut.

He pulled his flannel over his head, then pushed himself up out of the chair with one hand on the table.

"Turn around," he said.

"I've seen all of you."

"Not this part. It isn't pretty."

I didn't turn around.

It wasn't pretty.

His back bowed. His shoulders cracked.

He went down onto his hands on the kitchen floor with a sound that was half groan, half growl.

Then there was a wolf in my kitchen.

He was huge. Black from nose to tail, with a pale streak across the chest where his collarbone scar would be.

His head came up past the edge of the table.

His eyes were gold.

He stood on three legs. The right hind one he held up off the floor, curled tight against his belly.

I knelt on the boards in front of him.

"Hi," I said.

He put his nose against my neck and breathed in, long and slow.

Then he licked my ear.

"That's disgusting," I said, and I was crying.

He shifted back a minute later because the hip wouldn't hold him.

He lay on the kitchen floor naked and laughing, and I lay down beside him.

The knot on his right hip was still there, black and hard as a walnut.

For the next thirteen days, nobody knew but us.

The Gamma came down the morning after the cellar with his cap in his hands.

"The Alpha says keep your wife," he told me on the ramp. "He says he'd rather beat her on the mountain in front of everybody."

"And my father?"

"Stays in the cellar till the Run." He turned his cap around once. "I took him a blanket."

"Thank you."

"Don't tell anybody I did."

I climbed the Ladder every night after that.

Alone. In the dark. With a headlamp and Wanda's feed sack drawing in my head.

The twins waited at the top with a thermos and no rope.

On the third night I got stuck under the Keyhole for ten minutes and couldn't make my legs move.

On the ninth night I did it in thirty-four.

Every night after that I lay with my palm on Granger's right hip, and every morning the knot was smaller.

Every night, after the strays were asleep, he shifted in the dark behind the woodshed and ran.

Just a little farther each time. Just to see.

On the twelfth night he came back on four legs, all four of them touching the ground.

On the thirteenth night, the night before the Run, we all sat down in the barn.

Wanda lay propped up in Thunder's stall with the feed sack drawing pinned over her head.

The rest of us sat on hay bales around the door table.

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