The Daughter They Didn't Want novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Minutes

Ash Thorsen drives her away while her pack bond tears. His touch is the only thing that steadies her. Felicity texts that Mom will tell the elders about the stone.

I got into the truck, and he pulled away before I had the door shut.

The gate and the torches and the whole pack slid backward in the side mirror.

Then something inside my chest snapped.

I folded over my knees and my breath went out of me in one long sound.

"That's the pack bond," Ash said. "Your father struck your name off the roll the second you cleared the gate. It's going to hurt."

"It's already hurting," I said through my teeth.

It felt as if someone had cut a rope I had been hanging from all my life, and I was falling, and nothing was below me.

My wolf came up under my ribs, scrabbling and frantic, and tried to turn the truck around.

My hands were shaking so hard I couldn't grip the door handle.

"I need to go back," I heard myself say. "I can't breathe. I'm going to be sick."

"You're not going back."

He took the next turn onto a dirt road without slowing down.

Gravel rattled under the floor, and the headlights swept across pine trunks.

Then his right hand left the wheel and closed around my wrist.

It was big and warm, and rough along the palm.

The moment he touched me, the wolf stopped scrabbling.

She went quiet all at once.

I lifted my head and stared at him.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing," Ash said. His jaw was tight. "Breathe in. Slowly."

I breathed.

The truck smelled of pine sap and coffee and wet wool, and under that, the dark, heavy scent of wolf.

My pulse slowed under his thumb.

I knew that smell.

I had smelled it once, at the back of the pack hall, on the night I turned eighteen.

I had been standing in the middle of a room full of people, shaking from my first shift, and I had caught it from the doorway.

By the time I turned to look, the man was gone.

"It was you," I said. "At my first shift. You stood at the back of the hall and you left."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Your father walked me out personally," Ash said. "He told me what he'd do to my pack if I came near you. My father told me the same thing an hour later."

"You're a Thorsen."

"Rowan's half-brother. Same father, different mother." His mouth twisted. "I'm the Thorsen nobody talks about."

I knew the name.

At Northlake gatherings there had been a gap at the table where an eldest son should have sat, and everyone talked around it.

"Why were you at my gate tonight?"

"I park there on every Garrick ceremony day," he said. "I came to see if you'd say the words. If you did, I was going to drive home and stay there."

He said it flatly.

My face went hot.

"And if I didn't?"

"Then I'd already be at the gate."

I looked down at his hand on my wrist.

I should have pulled away, and I didn't.

"Where are we going?"

"My place. It's on the county line, thirty minutes. Rowan will check the road to my cabin first, so I'm taking the long way." He glanced in the mirror. "Anders will be with him. They're driving the big grey truck."

"Anders," I said. "He's the soft one. He cried when Felicity said her vow."

"He's the only one of us who doesn't know the whole game."

"What game?"

Ash opened his mouth.

My phone buzzed in the pocket of my ceremony dress.

I pulled it out, and the screen lit up the cab.

It was a message from Felicity.

"Mom says be back at the Moon Stone for Thursday's moon-reading, or she tells the elders what you did to the Stone when you were eighteen. Please just come back, Sigrid. I can't do this without you."

I read it twice.

Then I laughed, short and a little cracked.

"Unbelievable," I said. "They're still using that."

"Using what?"

"It's nothing. When I was eighteen I put my hand on the Stone at my first shift, because the Moon-reader told me to. It lit up for about two seconds, a kind of white glow."

I rubbed my face.

"Dad grabbed my hand off it and dragged me home. He said I'd cursed the Stone. He said if anyone found out, the pack would never trust me again."

"I was scared for months," I said. "My mother brought it up every time I disagreed with her."

The truck slowed.

Ash had gone completely still behind the wheel.

I'd seen wolves go still like that when they scented something across a field.

"Sigrid," he said, very quietly. "Say that again. The Stone woke under your hand?"

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