Wrong Girl, Right Alpha novel · Chapter 42 of 48

Chapter 42: The Wolf Takes the Door

Ronan's POV

The fever came with the dark.

I had planned to cross the river at dawn, with a dozen wolves at my back.

Dane's shirt lay on the kitchen table where she had left it.

I had looked at it for most of the evening.

By ten my skin was burning, and my hands were cold.

By eleven the gray had climbed past my throat to the hinge of my jaw.

I felt it there, a thin hard line under the skin along the bone.

I lay down beside Nora in the dark and told her I only needed an hour.

She put her hand on my chest, over the lines, and said nothing.

I waited until her breathing slowed.

Then I lay still and listened to my wolf.

He had been quiet for months.

He had gone down so far that I could only find him at night.

He was a low weight in my ribs that watched everything and said nothing.

Tonight he was awake.

He rose through me all at once.

I tried to hold the bed.

I got a hand on the frame, and then he took my legs.

I was standing before I knew I had moved.

I was in the hall with the floor cold under me and my own breath loud in my ears.

My body was walking.

It wasn't mine.

I put my shoulder to the wall and it kept going, along the boards, to the door across the landing.

It was the room that had been Nora's.

It was Hazel's now, with the cradle under the window and a night lamp the widows had made.

I heard her breathing through the wood.

Slow and small, with a catch at the end of every breath.

My hand went to the latch.

I told it to stop.

It didn't.

What my wolf wanted was simple, and I understood it perfectly.

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