Chapter 4: The Alpha Makes an Offer

On my fourth morning in the tower, the lobby elevator opened and four wolves came out of it.

I was at the coffee cart with Birdie, who had just handed me a cinnamon roll the size of my head.

"Duck," she said, quietly. "Is that him?"

"Yes."

The book had called Brant Brodie "a golden god of thunder with eyes like molten sunrise."

In person he was a very large man in a salvage company hoodie, with a short dark-blond beard and a scar through one eyebrow.

He looked like a guy who would help you move a couch and then complain about it all week.

The guards at the desk hadn't touched their radios.

Nobody wanted to be the first to start a war over a lobby.

"Haverty," the Alpha said.

He knew my last name.

I stopped chewing.

"That's me," I said, with my mouth full. "Can I help you?"

He glanced at my left wrist, where the mark was hidden under my sleeve.

I felt it light up anyway, a warm prickle under the cotton.

"I'm here to see Rhinelander."

"He's on eighty," Birdie said, with the voice of a woman defusing a bomb. "I'll tell him you're here."

"I'll go up."

"You will wait," said Benedict, behind me.

He had come down in the other elevator without a sound, in a black suit, with his hands in his pockets.

Every wolf in the lobby shifted.

"Alpha," Benedict said. "The treaty gives you the lobby. You'll find that's as far as it goes."

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