All Chapters of After the Alpha Rejected Me, I Came Back with His Twins: Chapter 11 - Chapter 18

The door gave at the third shove and I went down on the floor of the cabin with my cheek against a board, and two things arrived together: the cold, and his grief.A splinter stood up out of that board, frozen hard as a nail. It went into my cheek and I felt it happen from a long way off.The Mark at my neck was throbbing, and it was not throbbing to my heart. It kept somebody else's time.Up, Nyx said. Aria. That floor will kill you faster than the wind will.The cabin sat on the Elk Creek side, eleven or twelve miles down off the col — a hunter's box with one window, a stovepipe, and a tin roof somebody had nailed on wrong in about 1970. I'd smelled the creosote in that pipe from two hundred yards out."Okay," I said out loud. "Okay. Boots."My fingers didn't work. I got the laces with my teeth and my wrists, and when the first boot came off, the sock inside was grey and the other one was navy."That's a stupid thing to cry about," I told the room.Then don't, Nyx said. Stove.The s

The house was ready and she was never going to walk into it.I stood in the middle of that room on the ninth day with the door open behind me and made myself look at all of it.Beds made. Stove laid with kindling and never lit. Two months of food on the shelf, a lamp with a full reservoir, a bolt on the inside of the door that a wolf her size could throw one-handed.The hearth had ash in it from last winter, cold and grey and packed down, and I put my fingers in it for no reason I can defend.Four miles from the Pack House. Nobody knew it existed except Cole and the man who fitted the bolt, and I had meant to move her here on the seventh, three days before the Council sat, and I had told nobody why.Under my ribs, the bond pulled.That is the part I cannot get past. Not the grief — grief I could carry. It is the pull, the same wire under the sternum I have felt since I was nineteen years old, still tied to something, still going taut in a direction.North. It has pointed north for nin

A twig went behind me on the hatchery road, and I knew from the sound of it that whatever broke it weighed more than a deer.I did not turn around. I kept walking at exactly the speed I had been walking, with the propane bottle in one hand and the laundry sack over my shoulder, and I counted.Two sets of boots on crusted snow. Twenty yards back, spread wide, moving well.Deer don't spread out. Neither do hunters from town, in December, at four in the afternoon, on private ground with a gate.Creek, Nyx said, and there was a growl all the way through it. Not the cabin. Don't you take them to the cabin. Creek — now.I set the propane bottle down in the snow like a woman whose arm had got tired.Then I went off the road to the left and ran.Two months of that fire road twice a day, and I had never once been grateful for Nyx until that afternoon. No burn, no stitch, no black at the edges.I went down the cut through the alders with the laundry sack still on my shoulder, because dropping i

Damien's POV"You have her," I said. "Say it and we're done here."Kai Ashford stood on his half of the iron bridge with the wind coming off Silver Ridge behind him, and he smiled at me the way a man smiles at weather."No," he said."Ashford.""I don't have her, I've never had her, and no wolf of mine has laid a hand on her."He spread his fingers, unhurried. "Would you like it in the formal words? I've nothing to be careful of."The river was up and loud under the bridge. The wind at that ford comes down the cut with ice in it and takes the skin off your face, and it had been taking mine for eleven minutes.Cole stood at my left shoulder. Ronan Vey stood at Kai's, and had not once looked at me, which I noted."Two of the four cars that came up my ridge road had plates off a yard in your territory," I said."That yard sells to anyone with cash.""A man came to Trace Bellamy twice with the date of a Council notice before it was posted.""Then Trace Bellamy has interesting friends.""A