Thirty Nights Chained to the Alpha I Rejected novel · Chapter 1 of 1
Chapter 1: The Net
Sloane springs a silver net on the rogue she has tracked for eleven days; the wolf stops at her scent, shifts into the man she rejected, and she takes the Vigil herself; as she cuffs him he says she still sleeps on the left side of the bed.
The rogue I had hunted for eleven days stopped running the moment he smelled me.
He was a huge grey wolf, and he was halfway across the pass with the silver net already falling.
It should have caught him in the air.
It caught him standing still.
The wire came down over his shoulders and his back, and the snow hissed where the silver touched fur.
He didn't fight it.
He turned his head toward the rock I was standing on, and his eyes found mine across sixty yards of blowing white.
Grey eyes.
I knew them.
I had spent seven years telling myself I didn't.
"Warden," said the guard on my left.
He had a rifle with silver rounds, and he had been breathing too loud since we left the trucks.
"Warden, that's a clean shot."
"It isn't yours."
"The Speaker said if it ran."
"It isn't running."
The wolf had gone down on his belly in the snow.
Where the wire lay across him, the fur was smoking.
He still hadn't made a sound.
I went down the rock on my hands and boots.
Nobody stopped me, because I was the Warden and this was my hunt.
My legs were not entirely mine.
Fifteen feet from him I could smell burnt hair and pine.
Under it there was something warm and dark, like a house I used to live in.
My wolf lifted her head inside me for the first time in a year.
I told her to lie down.
She didn't.
The wolf in the net shook in one long shudder from nose to tail.
Then his body folded and stretched and came apart into a man.
A big man.
He lay naked on his side in the snow, with silver wire across his chest and thighs.
A line of blisters was rising along his ribs.
He was thinner than he'd been at twenty-four.
His hair was black and wet and far too long, and he had a short beard that hid most of his jaw.
The scar through his right eyebrow was the same.
"Sloane," he said.
His voice came out cracked, like something he hadn't used in a while.
I hadn't heard anyone say it like that in seven years.
Behind me the guards came down the rock, and I heard the safety go off.
"Step away, Warden. He's a rogue and he said your name. That's a lure."
"It's a name," I said.
"He killed Everett Pike."
"I know what he did."
I also knew what Speaker Osmund Pike had promised me for finishing it.
Ten more years on the valley lease, for all forty wolves of my pack.
I didn't turn around.
I knelt in the snow and lifted the net's edge off his chest with two gloved fingers.
The silver left its pattern behind in raw red diamonds.
He went rigid, and his teeth clamped, and he looked at me like I was the only warm thing on the mountain.
"Don't," he said. "It'll burn your gloves through."
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying."
"I said shut up, Harlow."
My glove was off before I had decided anything.
I put my bare palm flat on the burned skin over his heart.
I told myself it was to hold the wound shut.
His heart slammed up against my hand.
Something went through my arm like a live wire, up past the elbow and into my chest.
It was heat.
It was a hum, low and glad, a note I'd stopped hearing the night I said the words at the Midsummer fire.
The bond.
It was supposed to be dead on my side.
It was supposed to be a scar.
He made a tight, broken sound in his throat that I will hear until I die.
Then he turned his face into my wrist like a starving animal.
I yanked my hand back.
I put the glove on.
My fingers wouldn't line up with the cuff of it.
"Cuffs," I said, to no one.
One of the guards threw me the silver pair, and I caught them and didn't look at him.
I rolled the big man onto his front.
I was careful.
I pulled the grey wool scarf off my own neck.
I wound it twice around each of his wrists under the metal, so the silver wouldn't touch his skin.
The guard behind me said, "That's not protocol."
"It's my Vigil."
"The Speaker said..."
"The Speaker said bring him in alive, hold him thirty nights, and finish it on the thirtieth by my own hand."
I stood up.
My knees were not steady, and I locked them.
"That's what the writ says, and I read it."
"Nobody touches him but me, and nobody comes to the Vigil house until it's done."
"You can wait at the gate."
The two of them looked at each other.
The younger one lowered his rifle first.
I hauled the big man to his knees by the chain, and he came without a sound.
I got my coat off and dropped it over his shoulders.
It was too small for him.
It covered what mattered.
"Walk," I said.
He walked.
He leaned on me up the rock, heavy and hot.
Every place his skin touched mine through our clothes lit up like a struck match.
Neither of us said a word.
At the top the wind hit us, and the trucks were small and orange in the snow.
He stopped.
He lifted his head, and his face was a hand's width from mine.
His beard was crusted with ice.
"You still sleep on the left side," he said.
I stared at him.
"The side by the door. You always did."
"What?"
"Even tonight. You'll lie there, facing the wall, with one boot on."
I hadn't told anyone that.
Not Linus, not my father, not the man I had taken to bed three years ago in a stairwell and sent away before dawn.
My mouth was dry as paper.
"You've been watching me."
"No," said Thane Harlow, very gently. "I haven't been watching you, Sloane."
The guards were coming up behind us with the rifle.
He said, low, so only I could hear it, "I've never had to."
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