From Ashes to Their Luna novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Thirty Days, No Price

Kieran sets his terms on the Stonepine bank, the Beta's mate wraps her ribs, and horns sound across the creek: Hollow Creek has come to the border gate to take her back.

I stood on the bank with the cold coming up through my shoes and did not move.

"You're mistaken," I said. "I'm nobody's anything. Go back and sign your treaty."

"My Beta is signing it for me," he said. "I told him I had a more important appointment."

"With who?"

"You."

My ribs hurt every time I breathed.

I was dizzy and afraid, and the fear was the wrong kind. It was not the fear I had at home.

At home I always knew what came next.

"Why?" I said.

"Because you're my mate." He said it flatly, as a plain fact.

"My wolf knew the moment you turned twenty-two. I have felt you every hour since."

"Then why didn't you come?"

"I couldn't cross without an invitation. An uninvited Alpha across that line is a war."

"I don't have a wolf," I said. "Everybody knows that."

"Then somebody is wrong."

He looked at the way I held my left arm against my side.

"Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine."

"That is not what I asked."

I looked back at the pack house. Its windows were gold behind the trees, and nobody had come out.

I thought about the pencil I had left on the pantry shelf.

"Yes," I said. "I'm hurt."

"Will you come across?"

He held out his hand over the water, palm up.

Everything in me wanted to take it, and that scared me most.

I had spent fourteen years learning that wanting a thing was how a person got hurt.

So I took off my shoes and waded in on my own.

The water was so cold my feet went numb after three steps.

He did not reach for me. He walked backward up the far bank and kept his hands where I could see them.

When I climbed out, my legs gave a little.

His hand came up and stopped an inch from my elbow.

"No." I steadied myself on a pine. "Don't touch me."

"All right."

He took off his wool coat instead and held it out by the collar.

I put it on. It came down to my knees and was warm all the way through.

Where the wool lay across my shoulders my skin prickled, in the shape of a hand.

I pulled the collar tight and decided it was only the cold.

"Here are my terms," he said. "Tell me yours if you have any."

"You have terms?"

"You're a guest in my territory, nothing else. Nobody claims you and nobody marks you."

"And?"

"I won't touch you unless you ask me to. I won't ask you for anything for thirty days."

"And after thirty days?"

"If you want to go back, I'll walk you to the line myself."

I stared at him.

"What's the catch?"

"There's a lodge and a hot meal at the end of this trail," he said. "That's the catch."

Nobody had ever made me an offer with no price on it.

I did not know what to do with my face.

"Fine," I said. "Thirty days."

He nodded once and started up the ridge, and I followed him in the dark with my shoes in my hand.

The Stonepine lodge sat at the top, long and low, with every window lit.

Wolves in all kinds of clothes stood in the yard and went quiet when we came up.

Nobody looked away from me. A few of them nodded.

I was not used to that. It was almost worse than being ignored.

"My Beta's mate will see to you," Kieran said. "She's hurt."

A broad woman with flour up to her elbows came out of the kitchen door.

She wiped her hands and took one look at the coat, my bare feet and my arm.

"In," she said. "Now. Sit."

She did not ask me one question while she unbuttoned my blouse.

When she saw the bruises she said a word I had only ever heard Garson use.

There were yellow and green ones, and new purple ones, laid over each other from my hip to my collarbone.

There was not a mark above my collar or below my wrist.

"Whoever did this was careful," she said quietly.

"They were."

"That's the worst kind." She wrapped my ribs in a long strip of linen. "Two are cracked. You'll mend."

A mirror hung over the washstand.

I looked into it for the first time in a long while.

I saw a thin girl with a grey face and a stranger's coat hanging off her shoulders.

Inside the collar, Kieran's name was stitched in small black thread.

I was still looking at it when the horns started.

They came from across the creek, long and low and angry.

A second horn answered, and then a third.

The kitchen went silent.

A young wolf burst in without knocking.

"Alpha! Hollow Creek is at the border gate. Their whole family. They say you've taken something that belongs to them."

Kieran had been standing in the doorway the whole time.

He turned his head and looked at me, and I knew the answer before he asked.

"Nessa," he said. "They're asking for you."

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