Thirty Days Before My Alpha Lost Me Forever novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Circle

Iron Hollow's pack circles Tilda to read her scent, Dorian lays a hand at her throat and smells something under her own scent that isn't his, and a lookout reports a lone black wolf on the border stones.

Iron Hollow's land began where the paved road ended.

Dorian drove the last mile with the windows down, and I smelled woodsmoke, wet cedar and a lot of wolves.

The pack lived in an old sawmill yard, with long bunkhouses and a stack of split logs taller than the truck.

By the time we parked, sixty of them had come out into the firelight to look at me.

Most of them were men.

I still had the green dress on, the one Delphine had let out for me that morning.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking around the form, so I put it in my pocket.

"Out," Dorian said, and held the door.

I climbed down.

The six men who had ridden up behind us parked and came to stand at his back, and the rest of the pack closed in until I was in the middle of a ring.

They were big, tattooed, bearded and not quiet about staring.

"A guest comes into the yard, the pack reads her," Dorian told me. "It's how we do it. You can refuse."

"What does reading mean?"

"I stand close and breathe, and so does everyone else. If we don't like what we find, you're a guest who sleeps in the kitchen. If we do, you get a bed."

Under any other circumstances I would have refused.

But I had nowhere else to sleep, and the circle was only wolves doing what wolves do.

"Go ahead," I said.

Dorian stepped in front of me.

He was an inch or two taller than I was, with the sides of his head shaved and a black wolf's head inked up one side of his throat.

His shirt was open at the collar, and the tattoos went down from there.

He put two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up.

Then he laid his other hand flat at the base of my throat, over my collarbone, and leaned in.

His palm was hot, and the weight of it made my breath catch.

I told myself it was nerves.

He breathed me in, slowly, the side of my neck, my hair, the skin behind my ear.

"Cold rain," he said quietly. "Cut grass. Salt, from tears you wouldn't let anyone see."

"I wasn't crying."

"Not yet." His thumb moved once over my pulse. "And something under it that isn't mine."

My stomach turned over.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know yet."

He lifted his hand away, and the cool air hit the place it had been.

The ring of men shuffled in, one at a time, and breathed in the air around me.

None of them touched me, but I felt every one of them lean close.

Then a man with a split ear and a beard down to his chest laughed out loud.

"Ketch went out for a treaty and came home with a pillow," he said. "We going to sleep on her?"

A few of them snorted.

My face went hot, with everyone looking at my body and deciding what it meant.

I was done being decided about for one day.

"I'm a size twenty," I said, loudly, to the whole ring. "That's a number, not an opinion. If you want to talk about my body, say it to me, in a complete sentence, and I'll answer."

The man grinned, and I could tell he hadn't expected it.

"Fine. Can you run?"

"I outran the whole Blood Moon youth patrol for three summers."

"Can you fight?"

"I put an Alpha's enforcer on his back in the training yard at seventeen. He still brings it up."

"Can you cook?"

"No," I said. "I'll learn."

The man looked at Dorian, and Dorian said nothing.

Behind the man, a woman near the fire said, "I like her," and the ring loosened.

A short round woman with white hair in a bun and flour up to her elbows pushed through the circle.

She had reading glasses on a cord and a wooden spoon in her fist.

"Enough staring, you lot, she's had a day," she said. "I'm Odette. I cook, I heal, I run this yard, and you will eat something."

"Thank you," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted.

Dorian held up a hand, and the yard went quiet.

"Guest-right," he said. "Everyone hear me. Tilda Swinburne sleeps in my house under my roof until the Blood Moon. On that night I swear her as my ward, if this pack gives its nod. Earn it. Don't take it from her, and don't make her earn it twice."

"Thirty days isn't long," the man with the split ear said.

"It's thirty days less one," Dorian said. "Make them count."

He turned and looked at me then, and there was no joke in his face at all.

"You were right to walk out," he said. "Don't let them tell you that was the foolish part."

I nodded.

I wanted to ask what he'd smelled under my own scent.

Before I could, a whistle cut through the yard from the ridge above the sawmill, long and sharp.

Every head turned.

A boy sat in the lookout tree above the road, waving both arms.

"Alpha!" he shouted. "One wolf on the border stones. A black one. Blood Moon."

The whole pack went still.

Dorian's jaw tightened.

"Alone?" he called.

"Alone," the boy said. "And he's sitting down."

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