The Body-Swapped Heiress Returns as the Alpha's Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Truth Behind the Door
Valerie carries tea to her brother's study and hears that her swap is permanent in three days; she walks out, crosses the border and a black wolf blocks the road.
"The witch said that in three days, their souls will fuse for good," Jasper said through the study door, low and tired. "After that there's no undoing it."
I stopped in the hall with a tea tray in my hands.
It was the fourth night I had spent in my cousin's body.
Her chest hurt when I climbed stairs, so I had taken them slowly, one hand on the rail and the tray pressed against my ribs.
I had made the tea myself, with honey, because my brother Jasper liked it when he worked late.
He had carried my bags upstairs himself all week, and left a lamp burning in the hall so I would not trip.
I was going to knock.
"Then we only have to keep Valerie off the scent for three more days," said a second voice.
That was my fiancé, Darren.
It was the soft, patient voice he used on me when I was upset.
"She must never know it's permanent. If she knows, she'll go straight to the witch and try to fight it."
"She trusts us," Jasper said. "Any excuse will do. Tell her the swap needs rest."
I had agreed to the swap a week ago, in this same house, with both of them watching me.
My cousin Odette was dying. She was twenty-three and could barely finish a sentence without coughing, and the doctor had stopped giving us dates.
The witch had said a body could be cured only while it was empty.
So I had given Odette mine for seven days. My strong body, my wolf's lungs, my heart that had never once skipped on a run.
I had taken hers.
Jasper had promised I would be back in my own skin by the full moon.
I looked down at Odette's thin wrist on the tray.
Across the hall, through the open door of the dining room, I could see my own wrist.
Odette sat at the table in my body, laughing at something with her feet up on a chair.
She was wearing my mother's silver bracelet.
Jasper had made me swear to him at eighteen never to take it off, and before the swap he had checked its clasp twice.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was Darren's name.
I did not open it, because I already knew what it said.
I opened it anyway.
"Rest, love. Three more days and you'll be yourself again. I promise. I love you."
I read it standing in the hall while his real voice went on behind the door.
"Once it's done, Odette takes the wedding," Darren said. "The pack will see Valerie Redfern at the altar and no one will question it."
"And I stay Alpha-regent," Jasper said.
"You stay everything."
The tea was still hot against my hands.
I could have kicked the door open. I could have thrown the tray at his face and screamed until the whole house came.
Odette would have walked in from the dining room in my body, with my wolf's strength and my claws, and the pack would have seen a healthy heiress shouting at her sick cousin.
Nobody would have believed me.
So I set the tray on the hall table very carefully.
I took Odette's wool coat from the hook and put it on.
I walked out the front door.
The night was cold and smelled of snow.
Jasper had always driven us the long way around the lake, because the north road was closed for logging.
It was closed now. A chain hung across it with a red sign.
I stepped over the chain.
Odette's lungs burned after the first half mile and I coughed until I tasted blood.
I kept walking.
I did not know where the witch lived, except that she was somewhere near the river.
The river was the border.
On the other side lay the Crowe pack, the enemy my father had spent his whole life hating.
I had been told since I was a child that nobody from the Redfern pack crossed it and came back.
I crossed it anyway.
The stone that marked the line was waist high and covered in frost.
I put my hand on it and kept going.
My left wrist began to burn.
I pushed the sleeve of the coat up and stared.
A line of silver light was growing under Odette's skin, and it was spreading toward my palm.
Something moved on the road ahead of me.
A wolf stood in the middle of the gravel.
He was black and taller than any wolf I had ever seen, with a notched left ear and eyes that caught the moon.
He did not growl.
He took one step toward me, and the light in my wrist flared so bright that I had to look away.
A man's voice spoke inside my head, low and rough.
"Your scent is wrong," he said. "You smell like Redfern, and you wear a face I don't know. Who are you?"
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