They Stole Her for a Breeding Den, She Chose the Alpha Who Let Her Leave novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bakery Lot
Mara is taken in front of three witnesses by men she trusted, wakes in a stone lodge, and Silas names the Claiming nine days away while Darius says nothing.
The van door slid open in the bakery lot at five in the morning, and three people watched it happen.
The man unloading the flour truck watched.
The woman smoking by the bins watched.
The kid on the bike at the corner watched, and then he turned his bike around and rode away.
I was carrying a tray of cooling racks to the back door, and I stopped with my hip against the frame.
"Mara," Eli said.
He was coming across the lot toward me with his hands open.
Eli was the regular who took the corner table every morning and ordered a black coffee and the day's seeded loaf.
He had been doing it for two months.
He always asked how my mother's knee was, and he always left a ten on a four-dollar order.
"Eli, we're not open yet," I said. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. I need you to come and talk to someone."
"Who?"
"It's easier if you just come." He smiled at me, the same easy smile he gave me over the counter. "Nobody gets hurt, Mara. I promise you that."
I looked past him at the van.
There were four men standing around it, and every one of them was too big for the lot.
The tallest stood at the open door in a long dark coat, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on me.
He did not smile.
My wrists went cold, and I looked down.
White hair was coming up along the skin of both wrists, fine as frost.
It did that when I was afraid, and it was the only part of my wolf that had ever come when I called it.
The woman by the bins saw it.
She put her cigarette out on the wall and went inside without looking back.
I set the tray down very carefully, because I did not want to spill anything.
Then I ran.
I got four steps toward the street.
Eli caught my arm, and I turned and bit his hand as hard as I could.
He swore and did not let go.
I tasted blood, and I kept my teeth in him until a second man took me around the waist and lifted me off the ground.
He was warm and smelled of cedar smoke, and my feet kicked at nothing.
"Easy, little one," he said, in the voice of a man talking to a dog on a leash.
I screamed.
The flour truck driver turned his back.
Eli pressed a cloth over my mouth, and the last thing I saw was the tall man in the coat, who had not moved from the van door.
His eyes were on Eli's hand on my face, and he watched what was done to me and did nothing at all.
I woke up on a bed in a room with stone walls.
The bed was big and the blanket was heavy, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and salt.
My shoes were gone.
My cardigan was still on, and so was everything under it, and I checked that first with my hands before I let myself look at anything else.
Nothing had been done to me.
I sat up, and my head swam.
There was one window with iron bars set outside the glass, and beyond it a grey sea.
The door was oak, and it was locked.
I tried it three times anyway.
I decided on the spot that I would not cry in this room, and that I would learn it.
So I counted.
One door, one window, one fireplace with a flue too narrow for a child.
The door opened while I was counting the flagstones.
A heavy man in a pressed grey suit came in first, and four others came in behind him and stood along the wall.
Eli wore a bandage on his hand.
Nico was the broad, boyish one with dark curls who had lifted me, and he stared at the floor.
Ronan had a red-brown beard and a grin.
The last was Darius, the tall one in the long coat.
He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me, and I looked back.
"Miss Venn," the man in the grey suit said, and he set a tray of hot broth and bread on the blanket by my knees. "I'm Silas Kade. These are my nephews, Darius, Ronan, Eli and Nico, and this is my house. Eat first. You must be frozen."
"Let me go."
"I would like to," Silas said, mildly. "Not for a while."
"People saw. Three people saw."
"People saw a bakery girl go for a ride with her friends." He smiled at me. "No one is looking for you, Miss Venn. Your landlord has had a note from you. Your boss has had a note from you."
The one with the beard laughed.
I made myself speak slowly.
"What do you want from me?"
"A year of your life, to begin with. A child, if the moon is kind." Silas said it as he might have read out a menu. "You will be Claimed at the full moon, which is nine days from tonight, and every man in this room will stand for it. We have waited a long time for someone like you."
The words did not mean anything to me at first.
Then they did, and the room went very quiet.
I looked at the tall man in the coat, the one who had watched.
I looked at him and waited for him to say something, anything, to his uncle.
Darius Kade looked back at me with dark, steady eyes.
He said nothing.
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