The Exiled Alpha Is My Second Chance Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Man Who Bled In
Three years after her mate rejected her at the Stone, healer Dilys Nancarrow stitches a scarred stranger at her border clinic as a second bond flares gold, and he gives his name: Torquil Dacre, the exiled heir, come for his father's pack.
For three years the place where my mate used to be had been a hole in my chest.
Then, at ten past two on a freezing Tuesday morning, the hole lit up.
I was alone at the border clinic, counting gauze by the light of one lamp.
The heat started under my ribs and ran straight down into my knees.
I put both hands flat on the steel counter and breathed through it.
"No," I said out loud to the empty room. "We are not doing this again."
The bond had broken once already, in front of four hundred wolves, and I had nearly died of it.
My name is Dilys Nancarrow, and I am Silvercrest's healer, which is a polite way of saying I am the girl who got rejected.
At the Moon Ceremony three years ago, the Moon showed me Maddock Scrope, the Alpha's son.
I had my hand out to him before the light had even faded.
He looked at me with all of Silvercrest watching and said, "I reject you."
He said it cleanly.
The bond tore in half, and I spent three weeks on my mother's old cot feeding myself my own roots to keep my heart beating.
Most wolves do not survive a rejection like that, and I was told so by people who sounded disappointed.
The Alpha gave me this clinic at the end of Salmon Ridge Road, nine miles from the hall, "for my nerves."
Nobody drives out here unless they are bleeding.
The front door banged open.
A man came in sideways, one shoulder against the frame, and the cold came in with him.
He was tall and he was grey with blood loss, and he held his left side with a hand that was already black to the wrist.
Under the dirt his hair was cropped close and gone iron at the temples, and a long scar ran from his ear down his neck and under his collar.
His eyes found me across the room, pale grey going amber.
The burn in my chest flared so hard that I made a noise.
He heard it, and his face went very still.
"Healer," he said. His voice was gravel in a bucket. "I'm told you don't turn people away."
"Whoever told you that is a liar," I said, and I was already coming around the counter.
"They said you'd say that."
His knees went, and I caught his weight against my shoulder and walked him to the table.
He was heavy, and I am five foot nine and have hauled men heavier.
I cut the coat off him with the big shears.
The wound was under the ribs on his left side, a round hole with a black ring around it.
I did not need a lamp to know what it was.
The smell hit me, sharp and metallic, with a burn behind it.
"Silver," I said.
"A patrol outside Bell Ridge," he said. "Two days ago."
"Two days," I said. "You walked two days with silver in your lung."
"It's only touching the lung."
"That is not the comfort you think it is."
I washed my hands to the elbow, and he watched me do it.
When I put my palm flat over the hole to feel for the round, the bond went through me.
Gold heat ran from my hand up my arm, and under my hand his whole body arched.
"Ah," he said through his teeth.
"I know," I said. "Hold still."
"What is that?"
"I don't know, and I'm not going to think about it until you stop bleeding."
That was a lie, and we both heard it.
I dug the round out with forceps while he gripped the edge of the table hard enough to dent the steel.
He did not scream, and he did not look away from my face.
When the round finally rang into the dish, he sank back against the table.
I packed the wound with yarrow and sewed him closed.
My hands were steady, and I was proud of that, because the rest of me was not.
Every time my fingers touched his skin, the bond answered, and every time I felt him feel it.
"You can't be Silvercrest," I said. "I know every wolf in this pack, and nobody has a scar like that."
"I was Silvercrest," he said. "A long time ago."
I tied off the last stitch and looked up.
He was watching me.
"Dilys Nancarrow," he said, as if tasting it. "The healer they rejected."
"Everyone seems to know my business tonight."
"I know it because I felt it." His hand closed gently over mine on his ribs. "Three years ago I woke on a mountain with my chest on fire and thought I was dying."
The gold in my chest rolled over once, and I stopped breathing.
"That was the day the Moon broke you," he said. "And tonight the Moon gave you back."
"Who are you?"
He sat up slowly, grey and sweating and absolutely steady.
"Torquil Dacre," he said. "Aldous Dacre's son."
Every wolf in Silvercrest knows that name, because it is the one name nobody says.
Ten years ago the old Alpha's heir killed his own father and was driven out of the territory with a stone thrown at his back.
"I've come home for my father's pack," he said.
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