My Alpha's Betrayal: Burning in the Flames of His Vengeance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wind Shift
Thea runs toward the burning Redcliff lower row, saves her cousin Bryn, loses her family at the green door, and the wind tells her the man who ordered it is her fated mate.
I smelled the smoke before I topped the hill.
I was walking home from the vet barn, still in my coveralls, with a bag of dog biscuits for my little brother.
Then I saw the orange glow over Redcliff, and I dropped the bag and ran.
The lower row sat at the bottom of the compound, forty small houses along a creek.
Every one of them was burning.
Men in dark clothes stood at the end of each lane, and none of them wore Redcliff's colors.
They held torches and cans, and they were not hurrying.
I went around them through the creek, with water to my waist and my heart in my teeth.
The fire roared in the narrow lanes.
Our house was the third from the creek on the east row, with a green door my father repainted every spring.
The green door was shut, and flames were pouring out of the window beside it.
"Mama!" I screamed.
I got to the step and the heat knocked me flat.
Something small was screaming next door.
It was my cousin Bryn, fourteen years old, standing at her bedroom window with her hands over her face.
Her door had fallen in and the hall behind her was gone.
I had one breath to choose.
I could pull the green door, or I could pull a child through a window.
I broke the glass with my elbow and grabbed her under the arms.
She came out with her hair on fire, and I smothered it with my own hands.
Behind me, the roof of my parents' house came down with a sound I still hear.
I turned and I could not get closer than the step.
"Wes," I said, and then I said it louder, because my brother was nine and he always slept with his dog.
The dog was barking somewhere inside the fire.
Then the dog stopped.
Bryn pulled at my sleeve and I let her drag me, because there was nothing in front of me but heat.
We went back into the creek and lay in the cold black water under the footbridge.
I held her mouth shut so she would not scream and bring them down on us.
My grandmother's house was still standing at the end of the row, and I watched it catch.
My mother had been making plum jam that night.
I could smell the sugar burning.
Footsteps crossed the bridge over our heads, and I held my breath.
A man's voice said, "Beta says the doors are clear down here, Alpha."
"All of them?" another man said.
His voice was low and rough, and it had smoke in it.
"All of them," the first man said.
"Then burn what's left," the second said. "Every roof. I want nothing standing that carries their name."
The wind turned.
It came down the creek bed and it carried the smell of the one who had spoken.
Cedar, and iron, and something warm under it, like bread coming out of an oven.
My wolf woke up inside me so hard that I bit my tongue.
I knew that smell.
My mother used to tell me about it when I was small, and I used to roll my eyes.
You know him the first time the wind carries him to you, she said.
Everything in you says yes before you've even seen his face.
I pushed Bryn's head under the footbridge and looked up through the slats.
He stood in the firelight at the end of the bridge, taller than the others, with black hair and a beard.
His left arm was bare and burned up to the elbow, and he held it against his chest.
He coughed into his fist, and it came out black.
He coughed again, so hard that he bent over, and a man ran to him.
"Alpha, you've got to get clear of the smoke."
"I can't smell a thing," he said, and he sounded almost angry. "Not the fire, not the creek, nothing."
He straightened and stared at the burning lane.
He did not look down at the creek.
He did not catch my scent at all, because the wind had blown from him to me, and nothing of me had gone back.
Tobias Kincaid, Alpha of Stonebrook, stood twenty feet above my head and ordered my family's graves burned.
His men had killed everyone I loved.
And the Goddess had made him mine.
I lay in the water with my cousin's heart pounding against my ribs and I made a promise to the dark.
I would find a way to stand in front of him.
I would make him say their names out loud, in front of everyone he had to answer to.
He was my mate, and he had no idea I was alive.
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