My Alpha Expected Me to Read His Mind, So I Left His Pack novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

Odessa explains what an unreleased wolf suffers, the four friends watch Freja leave through the gate, and the boundary stone drops her to her knees as Ansel's howl answers hers.

Cordelia's glass hit the floor and nobody turned to look at it.

"Ansel," Emmett said quietly. "Say something else."

Ansel stood up so fast his chair scraped the boards.

He looked at me, and his mouth worked.

Then he walked out through the side door and left eighty wolves staring at the place he'd been.

I picked up my silver pin from the table.

"Fine," I said. "Then I'll go without it."

Odessa found me on the porch ten minutes later, rocking her chair in the dark with her cane across her knees.

"Sit down, girl. You're not leaving until you hear what that 'no' costs you."

I sat on the step below her.

"An unreleased wolf stays tied to the pack," she said. "Go a day, you'll be fine. Go a week, your wolf starts to sicken. Fever, shaking, the shift slipping out of your hands."

"And after that?"

"After about thirty days it gets bad. Worse every day he keeps you tied."

She said it plainly.

"That's cruel," I said.

"It's old," Odessa said. "Old isn't the same as cruel. But he's being cruel tonight, and I'll tell him so."

"Why won't he just say it?"

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You'd have to ask my grandson that," she said. "And you'd have to ask him out loud."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"He doesn't do that."

"No," Odessa said. "He doesn't. Go pack your bag."

I packed one suitcase.

My clothes, my laptop, my mother's recipe cards, and the cream wool coat I wore to funerals and to the one real vacation I'd ever taken.

I did not pack the pin.

I left it on the pillow of the bed I'd slept in for ten years.

When I came down the stairs with the case, Cordelia was waiting at the bottom with her eyes red.

"I'm so sorry, Had," she said. "I'm so sorry. I didn't think. I'll carry that."

She took the suitcase out of my hand and carried it down the steps herself.

"I'll drive you to the bus in Manzanita," she said. "It's the least I can do."

"I'll walk," I said. "Thank you, though."

She hugged me hard, and she smelled like the lavender soap she had always used.

"Call me when you land," she said. "Please."

"I will."

I meant it.

The gate of Garrick Hall was black iron, taller than a man, and for ten years I had passed through it without once looking back.

That night they stood on the other side of it, waiting for me.

Emmett had his hands in his jacket pockets and his shoulders up around his ears.

Nolan had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on his sleeve, over and over.

Cordelia had come out behind me and stopped on the gravel.

Ansel stood alone at the gatepost, in his black coat, with his arms at his sides.

I stopped in front of him.

The lamp above us buzzed.

"Is this the plan?" I said. "You stand there and let me go?"

His throat moved.

His eyes were gold in the lamplight and they didn't leave my face.

"Say it," I said. "Anything. Tell me one thing you want."

Nothing.

I picked up my suitcase and walked through the gate.

"Freja," Nolan said behind me, hoarse, like he'd had to dig for it.

I didn't stop.

The road ran down through the dark trees for a mile, and then it reached the boundary stone, a grey rock the height of my hip with a ring of old iron nails hammered into the top.

I had walked past it a thousand times.

I stepped across the line.

The pain hit.

My knees went out, and the gravel bit my palms.

My wolf screamed inside my chest, high and awful, and I'd never heard it make that sound.

I couldn't breathe.

I crawled.

I dragged the suitcase by the handle and I crawled across the line on my hands and knees until the paving changed under my fingers.

Behind me, up on the ridge, a howl rose over the pines.

It was long and low and it cracked at the end.

I knew whose it was.

I knew it before I even lifted my head, the way I had always known everything about him.

And for the first time in ten years, my own wolf answered it.

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