The Exiled Alpha Is My Second Chance Mate novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cold Room

Fenella and Maddock's patrol hunts rogues at the clinic; Dilys hides Torquil and lies to her old mate's face, then Torquil tells her three hundred wolves are nine days from the Hunt Moon and he wants her beside him, not as a prize.

I had ten minutes to hide a man before the headlights reached the clinic.

I heard the engines first, three of them, coming up Salmon Ridge Road at a speed nobody uses for a social call.

"Patrol," Torquil said from the table. He had gone the color of candle wax. "They followed my trail."

"Can you stand?"

"I can do whatever you need."

"Then stand up, and don't be charming about it."

The corner of his mouth moved, which hurt him, and he got up with a hand on my shoulder.

His weight against me made the bond hum, and I told it to shut up.

The clinic has a walk-in cold room at the back for blood, vaccines and the occasional body.

I put him on a crate between the shelves, threw a wool blanket over him, and told him to breathe shallow.

"It's thirty-four degrees in here," he said.

I closed the steel door on his face and went back out.

I wiped the table, kicked the cut coat under the counter, and dropped the bloody gauze in the incinerator bin.

Then I ran the tap over my hands until the water ran clear, and I was drying them when the front door opened without a knock.

Maddock Scrope came in.

Three years had made him broader through the shoulders.

His chestnut hair was still parted and polished, and the cream sweater was still cashmere, and the signet ring was still on his finger.

I looked at him and felt nothing at all, which was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.

The bond he had cut was a dead tooth, and he could not even make it ache.

"Dilys," he said. "You look well."

"It's three in the morning, Maddock."

"We have a rogue bleeding through our territory."

Behind him came two riders in grey Silvercrest jackets, and behind them came Fenella Quist.

Fenella wore white silk at three in the morning, with her black hair cropped in a pixie cut and her mouth done in red.

She looked at my clinic the way you look at a stain.

"It smells like a butcher's in here," she said.

"It's a clinic," I said. "People bleed."

"Anyone come through tonight?" Maddock asked.

"Nobody comes through. It's nine miles from anywhere. That's what it's for."

He stood a long moment too close to me, and I knew he was breathing in.

"You smell like a man," he said.

Heat climbed my neck.

"I smell like iodine and yarrow, because I work for a living."

Fenella laughed, bright and sweet, the laugh she uses when people are watching.

"Oh, let her have someone, Maddock," she said. "Honestly, I think it's lovely."

She lifted her left hand and let the lamplight fall on the ring.

It was an enormous emerald-cut diamond, the kind you pick to be seen from across a hall.

"We're getting married at the Winter Moon," she said. "I know you'll be too busy to come. It's all right. Healers are always busy."

Behind the steel door of the cold room, something shifted on a crate, quiet as breath.

The bond sang through my ribs, and my eyes cut toward it for half a second.

Maddock noticed, because he is not stupid, only lazy.

"What's back there?"

"Insulin, and a dead raccoon someone's dog brought in."

"I'll look."

"You'll open that door and let the cold out, and I'll bill you for six hundred dollars of vaccine," I said. "Go ahead."

He stared at me.

Three years ago I would have apologized for talking back.

He saw that I wasn't going to, and something moved behind his eyes that I could not read.

Then his shoulders dropped, and he took a folded paper out of his jacket and laid it on the counter.

"The Alpha's closing this clinic after the Hunt Moon," he said. "Nine days. Pack your things."

"My patients have nowhere else."

"Then they'll come to the hall like everyone else does."

"The hall is nine miles away, and half of them can't walk."

"You should have thought of that before you started taking in strays."

He turned at the door, and the dead bond between us twitched, a flinch I did not give him the satisfaction of watching.

"You could have been standing next to me tonight," he said, very quietly.

Fenella heard it, and her smile went tight.

"I couldn't have stood that close," I said. "You'd have had to turn around."

The engines took a long time to fade.

When the door of the cold room opened, Torquil came out stiff with cold and leaned against the doorframe.

"I like you," he said.

"You're shivering."

"I'm also impressed, which is warmer." He looked at the paper on the counter. "Nine days."

"They want the clinic gone after the Hunt Moon. Nobody told me why."

"Because on the Hunt Moon the Moot sits at the Stone, and it's the one night a challenge for the seat can be called."

He said it plainly, as if reading a map.

"I have three hundred wolves on Bell Ridge, Dilys. We take Silvercrest on the Hunt Moon, lawfully, at the Stone, in front of the whole pack."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because the Moon doesn't hand out a second bond for fun," he said, and his eyes had gone amber. "I want you standing next to me when I do it."

"As what?"

"Not as a prize," he said. "Never as a prize."

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