Chapter 12

Asher’s POV

“You must be the Alpha who throws girls away,” said Kezia Vane. “I thought you’d be taller.”

She was leaning on the hood of a dusty green pickup just inside the iron gates, eating an apple. Three Clearwater wolves stood behind her, big men in denim jackets, with their hands loose at their sides. Two of my gate guards stood in front of them, and neither side looked happy about it.

I had run the whole way from the council chamber. I was trying not to breathe like it.

Kezia was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Lean as a fence rail, in a black tank top and cargo pants despite the cold, with her dark hair shaved close on one side and long on the other. A scar split her upper lip and ran up toward her nose, white against brown skin. She had Leah’s gray eyes, but where Leah’s were soft, hers were flat and bright as a creek in winter.

She looked at me the way I looked at a fence I was about to climb.

“You’re early,” I said. “Twenty-nine days early.”

“Twenty-eight and a half.” She bit the apple. “Uncle Reuben said the ring here is old stone. I wanted to see the floor. Stone’s hard on the knees.”

“You could have called.”

“I could have.” She chewed. “But then I wouldn’t have seen your face.”

Behind me, gravel crunched.

I didn’t need to turn around. I smelled her before I heard her. Bread and honey and warm rain, and under it now, faint and sharp, the cold metal edge of my own poison. My chest tightened.

Noa came to stand beside me. Not behind me. Beside me. She wore Leah’s sweater and her apron and a pair of slippers that were ridiculous on the gravel. The silver streak in her hair caught the light. Dana Marks trailed a few steps behind her, looking like she wanted to be anywhere else.

“I’m Noa,” she said. “You asked for me.”

Kezia straightened off the truck.

She walked across the gravel slowly. My guards shifted. I lifted one hand and they stopped. Kezia stopped too, three feet from Noa, and looked her up and down, from her slippers to the top of her head. It took a long time. Noa let her.

“Huh,” Kezia said.

“Huh what?”

“You’re bigger than they said.”

“People say a lot of things.”

“They said you were soft.” Kezia’s eyes went to the silver streak. They narrowed. “You don’t look soft. You look tired.”

“I am tired. I’ve been working.”

“On him?” Kezia tipped her head at me.

Noa didn’t answer. Kezia smiled. It pulled the scar on her lip.

“I came to tell you to your face,” she said. “Uncle Reuben put my name in. I said yes. I’ve never turned down a challenge and I’m not starting with you. On the full moon I’ll walk into that ring and I’ll put you on the ground.”

“Okay,” said Noa.

Kezia blinked. “Okay?”

“You came a long way to say that. I heard you.” Noa reached into her apron pocket. She pulled out a roll wrapped in a napkin, still steaming a little. “Are you hungry? You’ve been driving all day.”

The three Clearwater wolves stared at the roll. One of them actually leaned forward.

Kezia looked at the roll for a long second.

“No,” she said. “I don’t eat my opponent’s food.”

“It’s just bread.”

“Nothing you make is just bread, Luna.” Kezia tossed her apple core over her shoulder. It landed in a flower bed. “Everyone in the Northwest knows that by now.”

She turned to me.

“I’ll stay in your guest house. My uncle’s arranged it. Don’t worry, Alpha, I won’t go near your Luna. I don’t need to.” She smiled again. “I’ll see her in the ring.”

She walked back to her truck. Her wolves followed. The engine coughed and growled, and the green pickup crawled up the drive toward the guest house, kicking up gravel.

Noa put the roll back in her pocket.

“Well,” she said. “She seems nice.”

Dana made a choking sound.

I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t. I was watching the pickup, and I was thinking about the way Kezia had looked at Noa’s hair, and the way she had said I’ll put you on the ground, and the thing she hadn’t said after it.

Reuben Vane was waiting for me at the top of the front steps, with his hands in the pockets of his cardigan, watching the green pickup disappear among the trees.

“I’m so sorry, Alpha,” he said, before I could open my mouth. “I had no idea she’d come early. Kezia has always been headstrong. Her mother was the same.”

“You invited her.”

“For the full moon. Not today.” He shook his head sadly. “But she’s here now, and it would be a terrible insult to Clearwater to send her away. You know how proud the Idaho packs are.”

“She stays in the guest house. She doesn’t come near the kitchen or the east wing. I’ll have two of my wolves on her door day and night.”

“Of course. Whatever makes you comfortable.” Vane’s mild eyes slid past me to Noa, standing on the gravel in her slippers with a roll in her pocket. “Your Luna is very brave. Offering bread to the girl who’ll fight her. My niece won’t forget it.”

“Neither will I.”

“No,” said Vane softly. “I don’t suppose you will.”

He went inside. I stood on the step and listened to his soft steps on the stone until I couldn’t hear them anymore. Then I went back down the steps to where Noa was waiting.

“Barn,” I said. “Tomorrow. Five o’clock.”

~

The old barn sat at the bottom of the north pasture, half a mile from the pack house, with a sagging roof and a floor of packed dirt that had been swept by nobody for twenty years. My father had trained me there, when I was fourteen and too angry to be around other people. Nobody came down here anymore. That was the point.

Noa arrived at five past five. She wore borrowed sweatpants and a T-shirt that said SILVERLAKE BAKE SALE 2019, and she was carrying a thermos.

“Coffee,” she said, holding it out. “For after. If I survive.”

“You’ll survive.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Noa.”

“Kezia is.”

I took the thermos and set it on a hay bale. “Then let’s start.”

I showed her how to stand. Feet wide. Knees soft. Weight low. She did it, and wobbled, and did it again. I showed her how to keep her hands up. She put them up. I tapped her shoulder with two fingers, light as a fly, and she fell over sideways into the straw.

She lay there and looked at the roof.

“This is going to be a very long month,” she said.

“Get up.”

She got up. We did it again. And again. By six her face was red and her hair was coming loose and she had fallen into the straw eleven times.

On the twelfth time she didn’t fall.

I pushed. Harder than the tap. She rocked on her heels and set her feet and simply didn’t move. I pushed again, with real weight behind it this time, and it was like leaning on the side of a hill.

I stopped.

“Do that again,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Whatever you just did.”

She frowned. “I was thinking about Kezia saying you look tired. And I got annoyed. And I sort of sank.”

“Sank?”

“Into the floor. Like dough into a pan.” She shrugged. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” I walked around her. She turned her head to follow me. “Kezia fights fast. Everyone she’s beaten, she beat with speed. In and out before they know she’s there. She’ll try to knock you off your feet, because she thinks that’s the easy part.”

“It is the easy part. I’ve been on the floor eleven times.”

“Twelve times you weren’t.” I stopped in front of her. “You don’t need to be fast, Noa. You need to be the one thing in that ring she can’t move.”

She stared at me. Her eyes were brown and very bright.

“Show me,” she said.

So I showed her. How to drop her hips when she felt a push. How to plant. How to turn a shove into nothing by letting it roll off her shoulder. I stood behind her with my hands at her waist to show her where her weight should sit, and the second my palms touched the curve of her hips, we both went still.

Term three.

“I should have asked,” I said. My mouth was near her ear. I hadn’t meant it to be.

“Yes,” she said. “You should have.”

I started to take my hands away.

“I didn’t say move them.”

I froze.

She was breathing faster. I could feel it under my hands, the rise and fall of her ribs. The straw dust hung in the gray light from the high window, and the whole barn smelled of hay and cold earth and her. Ari had gone utterly silent inside me. Not angry. Not pacing. Waiting.

She turned around.

It brought her right up against me. Her hands came up and rested flat on my chest, over my heart, which was going like a hammer. She looked up. Her lips parted. I could feel the heat of her through two layers of cotton.

“Asher,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Ask me.”

The words went right through me. I lifted one hand and touched the silver streak at her temple, very lightly, with the back of one finger.

“Noa,” I said. My voice was gone. “Can I...”

The barn door banged open.

We sprang apart so fast she tripped on a hay bale and I caught her elbow, and we both turned toward the door, breathing like we’d run a mile.

Micah stood there. He looked from me to her. His face, which usually gave away everything, gave away nothing at all.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if it weren’t bad.”

“What is it?”

He didn’t look at me. He looked at Noa.

“Kezia Vane’s been down at the training yard since sunrise,” he said. “Running drills. Half the young wolves went to watch. And she’s been talking.”

“About what?” Noa said.

Micah finally turned his eyes on me, and in them I saw the thing I had been dreading since the night in the great hall.

“About the challenge rules,” he said. “Section nine. She told the whole yard it’s not to the first wolf who falls. It’s to yield or to the end. And if the Luna won’t yield, there’s no one allowed to stop it.”

Noa’s elbow went rigid in my hand.

“She also told them,” said Micah quietly, “that the Alpha’s known that from the start.”