My Mate Didn't Want Me, So I Refused Him Louder novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Thirty Days

Linnea shifts for the first time in her grandmother's barn, and the Alpha arrives at dawn with the Council's law; she sets her terms.

I didn't sleep.

Ingrid left me at my grandmother's farm after midnight, with a hug and a promise to bring soup in the morning.

By one o'clock my skin was burning.

By two, I was lying on the kitchen floor with my cheek against the cold linoleum and my teeth chattering.

"It's the refusal," Oda said from the doorway, in her barn coat over her nightgown. "Unanswered, it makes you sick."

"I'm fine," I said, and threw up in the sink.

My grandmother handed me a dish towel. She is seventy-four and has never once told me I'd be fine.

At three, something in my back cracked.

I screamed and ran for the barn, because I didn't want the house to hear it.

Oda followed with the lantern and shut the door behind us.

My spine bent and my hands went wrong, and there was nothing to do but go through it with my face in the straw.

When it was over I was on four legs.

The barn looked silver and sharp, and I could smell every animal that had ever lived in it.

A big grey wolf stood in the lantern light on legs that shook.

Oda looked at me for a long moment.

"Aaberg women wake late," she said. "Your mother was twenty-six. Hold still."

She ran her hand along my neck, and then she put her face down and breathed me in.

"Pine smoke," she said quietly. "Cold iron. He's all over you, and you never touched him."

I whined.

"Yes, I know," Oda said. "Now do the other thing and come back to me."

It took me till sunrise to learn how.

By the time I was sitting in the straw in my grandmother's coat, I could feel the wolf curled up inside me, awake and furious.

She wanted him.

She wanted to run the nine miles to the lodge and put her teeth in his throat and then lie down at his feet.

I wanted to put my head back in the bucket and be sick again.

A truck horn sounded at the end of the drive.

Oda looked out the barn window and her mouth went flat. "The Hauge boys."

I went out in my boots and her coat with straw in my hair.

Torin was standing at the farm gate with his hand on the latch, not opening it.

His brother Anders leaned against the truck behind him with his arms folded.

Torin had slept even less than I had. His eyes were rimmed red, and the gold kept coming up and going down in them.

The wolf in me threw herself at my ribs.

I didn't move.

He took one slow breath through his nose, and his knuckles went white on the gate.

"You've shifted," he said.

"Yes."

"Then you know what's coming." His voice was flat. "A refusal that isn't answered makes the unmated wolf sick, then wild. It's Council law. You come to the lodge until the Moon Stone. Thirty days."

"The lodge," I said. "Your lodge."

"The east wing is empty. You'll have a room."

"You want me to sleep under your roof."

"I want you not to go feral in your grandmother's kitchen." He said it to the gatepost, not to me.

Anders coughed. "He's trying to say please."

"I'm not," Torin said.

I looked at him for a long time.

He had stood in front of two hundred people yesterday and told me I smelled like nothing.

I could smell him from ten feet away, and he was not holding it together at all.

So I made up my mind.

"Fine," I said. "I'll come. On three terms."

His jaw moved. "Go on."

"One. You never set foot in the east wing."

"Agreed."

"Two. You don't touch me."

A muscle jumped in his cheek. "Agreed."

"Three." I walked up to the gate and stopped with only the wood between us. "On day thirty, at the Moon Stone, you stand up in front of the same two hundred wolves and take back what you said."

Nobody breathed.

Anders had stopped smiling.

Torin's eyes finally came up to mine, and the gold was all the way up.

"Thirty days," he said.

He let go of the gate, turned around and got in the truck.

Anders gave me a helpless little shrug and followed.

I stood in the road and watched them go.

"He didn't say yes to the last one," Oda said behind me.

"I know," I said.

"Good. Get your things." She put her hand on my shoulder, and it was warm. "And Linnea. A man who meant what he said wouldn't shake."

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