THE ALPHA’S SILENT MATE

EVE BALE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Alpha’s Silent Mate

Copyright © 2022 by Eve Bale

Cover by Burning Phoenix Covers

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

www.evebale.com

v2
 CO NTENTS

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About The Alpha’s Silent Mate

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Excerpt from Cold-Blooded Alpha

Excerpt from Fractured

Also by Eve Bale
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 A B O U T TH E A L P H A’ S S I L ENT M ATE

Trapped beneath the bodies of my dead pack, I wait for my end.

It isn’t death that finds me, but him.

One glance at the alpha who saves me is enough to reveal what he means to me. Everything.

Fated mate.

A man the universe made just for me.

But I can’t stay with him.

Slipping away before I kill Shay’s pack isn’t going to be easy. Not when he’s determined to save me, to protect me, to give me everything I want and need.

I can’t let him, even if I want those same things.

I never counted on the lengths he’ll go to keep me—but most of all, I didn’t count on how much I would want to let him.

A standalone wolf shifter romance that features a protective alpha, an innocent heroine in trouble, and enough swoon-inducing moments, steam, and
adult themes to make it suitable for 18+
 1

T he cold penetrates so deep into my fur that shivers shake my body, and I know I’ll never get warm again. But the will to fight, the strength to pull myself
free, evaporated long ago. Now I just wait for death.
It never comes.
Suddenly it’s no longer day, but night. The cold remains because it touches my soul.
A man’s vicious swear cuts clean through the silence, and a small whimper slips free before I can stop it. Voices can only mean one thing: He’s here. He found
me.
When footsteps move toward me, my heart beats in time to each heavy tread, the last beat harder than the first.
I try not to breathe.
If you don’t move, he will leave.
The weight pinning me to the ground is ripped away and I swallow a scream, already flinching before I realize it isn’t him. It’s someone I’ve never seen before
—but that doesn’t mean I don’t know who he is.
Or what he is.
A bond snaps into place. An unbreakable one.
Mate.
A naked man with shoulder-length, white-blond hair and a blue-green stare gazes down at me, his eyes widening with the same realization. He stretches a hand
toward me, and panic gives me the motivation I was missing before.
Staggering to my feet, I back away but lack the energy to go far.
A step.
That’s all I can manage, and even then, it takes everything I have. My muscles tremble and I sink back to the wet ground, panting with exhaustion.
The man draws his hand back with a gentle smile before sinking into a crouch so close to me that I know I’ll never relax. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”
It’s a lie.
The last man smiled as he said it. Now my pack is gone. Everyone but me.
“Shay!”
I don’t look away from the man with powerful shoulders and the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.
He doesn’t rise from his crouch, and he doesn’t move away. All he does is angle his head a little to the side, in the direction the shout came from. “What?”
The same man shouts back. “We have a live one. He—"
I know it can’t be my pack. I know it can’t be my family, because I’m wearing their blood on my fur.
“Find out what you can, and kill him,” Shay interrupts.
After his last words, he seems to no longer care. His eyes refocus on mine. “Can you shift, pup?”
He’ll never learn that I’m no pup, because I’ll stay a wolf until I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be a human girl. Or he kills me. Just because he’s my mate, it
doesn’t mean I can trust him.
His eyes soften. “That’s okay. You must be cold.”
A red-haired man, just as naked as Shay, approaches before he jerks to a stop, his face twisted in horror. “Fuck, she’s covered in—”
Shay’s smile doesn’t shift. “Get me a blanket. Use language like that around her again and I’ll cut out your tongue. Go. Now.”
My eyes widen.
He must be the alpha, even though he doesn’t look like he’s older than twenty-five. That means he’s the strongest and the fastest. It means he’s the one I
should fear.
Once I’ve lowered my guard, he’ll attack. That’s what he must be doing. So I can never relax. But he studies me with a faint smile on his face and makes no
move toward me.
In moments, the same man returns with a thick blue blanket he hands to the alpha. After a rapid glance at me, he backs up, this time not saying a word.
The alpha—Shay—opens the blanket and holds it up. “Come on, let’s get you warm.”
I don’t move.
When his smile fades, I tense to run. I won’t get far, but I have to try. “Pup, I would kill anyone who tried to hurt you. With me, you will always be safe.
Always.”
I want to believe him. With every fiber of my body, I want to believe what he says is true. But I can’t. I can’t trust anyone. Not even myself. I only have to take
in all the death that surrounds me, scents the air, and covers my fur to know that.
If I could run, I would never stop.
“Can I come to you, then? Just to wrap you in the blanket. We can stay here for as long as you want.”
Seconds turn into minutes. But when he doesn’t lunge or do anything to threaten me, I nod once.
Just as he said, he shifts a little closer and wraps me in the blanket. The moment he’s done it, he retreats, this time further away. To a distance where I think I
might be able to relax. A little.
Instead of dropping into a crouch, he rests his back on the nearest tree with his legs stretched out in front of him.
I keep my gaze trained on his face. The forest is dark, but it could never be dark enough to hide all the bodies I desperately don’t want to see.
It takes a long time for the warmth of the blanket to reach my bones, but eventually—hours later—it does. Wherever the rest of the alpha’s men have gone, I
don’t know.
For now, it’s just us in the dark and the cold. He never complains about the soggy ground or when a biting wind lashes him. He merely sits with his eyes fixed
on a point in the distance.
I think he could stay that way forever.
 The sun is peeking through the trees when I stir.
His eyes return to me. “You ready for me to take you somewhere warm, pup?”
After a long moment, I nod.
Moving slowly, he lifts me in his arms and carries me away from my dead pack.

My new home becomes one room in Wolfkeep, home of the Clayfell pack—so deep in the Utah forest that the nearest human town is too far to walk.
Or not so much a room. One tiny corner of it.
To reach me, someone would have to be a wolf as small as I am to squeeze themselves under the bed. And even then, they couldn’t get to me.
My sharp teeth would stop them before they got too close.
But no one tries.
The only one who enters the room is Shay, who brings my meals on a tray, which he slides toward me.
At first I think the only reason I don’t try to bite him or claw him is because, without the blood and death, I smell him. Sandalwood, vanilla, and fresh sage. It’s
a scent that makes me feel safe and warm.
He never tells me to get out or tries to lure me out. He just talks. For hours. About his pack, about all the places to run and play. About how he wished he
knew my name.
It’s only at night, when I’m sure everyone is asleep, that I risk slipping out to use the bathroom and to scrub myself clean.
But during the day, my place—my sanctuary—is under the bed.
Every day, I creep out a little further.
Shay must know, because he doesn’t have to push the tray as far as he did before, but he never comments on it. He removes the tray from the night before and
replaces it with a new one.
Two months later, Shay steps around the door of my room and halts at the sight of a naked woman sitting on the edge of the bed instead of a wolf hiding under
it.
The heat in his eyes triggers a slow, pulsing need inside me. Although my long, blonde hair covers me like a cape, I wish it didn’t. I wish I was standing so he
could see me. All of me.
“I was wrong,” he murmurs as his gaze returns to my face. “You’re no pup at all.”
He’s not the first to make that mistake. I’ve always been a small wolf, with dark brown fur which always surprises people because my human hair is blonde.
Even when I turned nineteen, I was still the shortest woman in the pack at five feet. Petite. That’s what everyone called me.
Before they all died.
Before you killed them all.
“My mate is a beautiful woman.” His lips curve in a smile, and I duck my head as a blush sears my cheeks.
I tense a little at his approach, but I don’t move away. He’s had two months to prove that he’s no threat to me, so I don’t treat him like one.
A soft blanket settles lightly over me, and Shay—dressed in a pair of black sweats, a gray t-shirt, and his long white-blond hair touching his shoulders—sinks
into a crouch in front of me. “I brought some clothes for you before, but I don’t think any of them will fit. I’ll fix that.”
That’s what alphas do. They fix things. My dad was the same way.
If I’d been a little braver, I would have explored the door that must lead to the closet. But the only place I’ve ventured in a bedroom bursting with bright green
plants in clay pots is the bathroom.
And even there, I never lingered.
Whatever clothes he'd had someone fill the closet with would be nice. They’d smell as fresh and clean as the ones Shay always wears.
“Can I have a name?” he murmurs, drawing my gaze back to his.
It sounds like a straightforward question, but it’s not. I chew on my lower lip because I didn’t think this through before I climbed out from under the bed. But I
should have.
He misreads my apprehension. “You don’t have to be afraid. Not of me, or of anyone here. You’re safe now.”
And that’s when I decide what to do.
After a quick scan of the bedroom reveals that the thing I need isn’t here, I rise from the bed and hold my hand out between us, palm side up.
As Shay gets to his feet, his eyes search mine, as if he wants to make sure this is what I want. When I do nothing but wait, he touches his palm to mine.
I watch as his hand swallows mine in a strange daze. It doesn’t feel real that he’s here. Shay. My mate. Some wolves never find theirs, but I’ve been lucky
enough to find mine.
“Mate,” he murmurs.
Two halves of the same whole.
The moment stretches until I realize how much time has passed. Shaking my head, I turn and lead him to the door he stepped through minutes before.
I’m reaching for the handle when a large, tanned hand beats me to it. Shay pulls the door open, and I step through it and into an oasis.
Or it would be, if it wasn’t bustling with people.
Men, women, and children spread out across a lush garden. They sit talking and laughing on stone benches and lean against the white stone wall which circles
it, between the bright bushes of wildflowers and plants.
On a beautiful blue-skied day with no clouds in the sky, there’s no excuse for anyone to be inside. Dozens of them. There must be at least sixty people here.
Maybe more.
But it feels at least twice that when they swing their heads toward me.
I back up, my eyes on the ground as whispers start. They soon gain momentum, spreading as fast as the wildflowers must grow. All are about me. Mostly
about my eyes, which always surprise people when they meet me for the first time.
Violet with blue flecks.
Mom used to tell me I must be the only one in the world with eyes like it. Dad said the only thing more beautiful were the stars.
Until you killed him, just as you’ll kill this pack if you don’t leave.
Their attention smothers me until I can’t breathe. I’m embracing my wolf so I can shift and run, but Shay sweeps me into his arms, his hold firm and secure. I
inhale the scent of his skin, and my heart stops pounding so hard. “Everyone go. Ewan, not you.”
I press my face against his throat because it feels like the perfect place to hide. Shay stalks us forward, and as he does, I feel movement away from us. He
could have taken me back into the bedroom, but maybe he thought if he did that, I would never leave it again.
He was right.
 The stone bench is cool beneath the thin blanket Shay wrapped me in. When I lift my head, only Shay and the man who swore and nearly lost his tongue for it
are in the courtyard.
Ewan. He must be Shay’s beta, if he’s the only one who could stay.
Shay’s fingers on the side of my face pulls my attention from the red-haired and green-eyed beta to find he’s once again crouched in front of me. “You wanted
to show me something?”
I shake my head.
His eyes dip to my lips. “You can’t talk.”
I shake my head no, even though it’s a lie. Once I spoke. But that was in another life, before I became the girl who killed her pack. So I don’t talk.
Not anymore.
Shay’s eyes find mine. “Do you sign?”
I shake my head no.
“Did your pack have a teacher?”
Clever.
I nod. We shifters don’t go to public school. Our history has taught us again and again that the safest place for a shifter is with the pack. Each pack has a
teacher so the children can learn how to read, write, and how to do sums. Anything else would just be a waste of time when we spend our days living in the
forests.
He tilts his head to the side. “Ewan?”
“Alpha?” His beta’s response is immediate. I don’t look away from Shay, just as his eyes never leave mine.
“Get a pad and pen,” Shay says.
Gravel crunches as Ewan steps off the grass and onto the stone path that winds around the garden. Shay’s voice stops him before he can take another. “A
small pad. One that’s easy for my mate to hold. And a pouch so she can carry it with her, whether she’s human or a wolf.”
It feels like Ewan is gone only a second before the gravel once again announces his return. He's clutching a small pad, a pen, and a small black pouch with a
long strap that I can slip on my shoulder or hang from my neck when I’m a wolf. He hands it all to Shay before retreating a step.
Shay’s eyes are sober as he places everything in my palms. “You don’t have a voice, but with this, you do.”
He tempts me to break my promise with those words. But instead of speaking, I take the pad and pen from him.
I feel his eyes on my hands as I write four letters. Before I turn the pad around and show him, I’m almost positive I don’t need to. That he was reading as I
wrote.
He lifts his head from the pad, and his eyes smile into mine. “Hello, Lexa.”
Although I smile back, I’m already planning how I can leave before I kill him.
 2

I n the week since Shay gave me a voice with a small pad and pen that I carry in the pouch around my neck, I’ve rarely left my room.
Just like my dead pack, men outnumber the mostly human women five to one—since female shifters are made, never born. But that isn’t why I hide.
Or, it isn’t only.
When there are more male voices out in the courtyard than women, I never leave my room unless it’s to sit in the garden with Shay. But today is different.
Today I stand beside the door, as I have for the last twenty minutes, trying to summon the courage to step out.
During his last hour-long pack meeting, Shay had Ana—an older human woman with hair more white than brown and blue eyes, who brings my meals when
he’s busy with pack business—keep me company. When he offered to do the same before he left, I shook my head no.
It’s taken all this time, but finally, I think I feel brave enough to leave.
All I have to do is close my hand around the doorknob and pull it open. Once I’ve done that, I just need to shift to wolf and run.
I don’t know how far I’ll have to run before I find a place where I won’t be a danger to Shay and his pack, but none of that can happen until I open the door.
My eyes don’t move from the smooth, dark wood an inch from my hand.
Shay tells me I’m safe here, that no one will ever hurt me. That he will always protect me. But that isn’t true.
If it was, he wouldn’t be calling a meeting to talk about the strangers spotted on the edge of pack land.
I know who those strangers are and what they want.
Me.
And when they come, they will leave death and blood behind, just like before.
So I have to leave. Now.
Swallowing hard, I do the thing I’ve avoided up until now. I close my hand around the knob and turn it.
Sun kisses my face the moment I step out, and two women sitting cross-legged on the grass turn my way.
The younger woman, a pretty blonde in a white cotton sundress with a sleeping toddler in her arms, smiles. “Good morning, Lexa. Did you sleep well?”
“Ahh!” A young boy in a pair of khaki shorts, who looks just old enough to interrupt a pack meeting, runs laps around them, distracting me for the moment.
“Joshua, stop screaming. People are still sleeping,” the other woman calls out. Joshua switches directions and runs faster, his little legs pumping as hard as his
arms.
I’m doing the right thing.
I pull the door firmly closed behind me.
Their eyes dip to my chest, and I know what they’re thinking before they ask. “Did you run out of paper?”
I smile as I walk toward the doorway which leads out of the courtyard and into the forest, trying to look like I’m too busy to talk.
Shay must have told the pack to keep their distance because, although their eyes follow me, they remain seated. “Okay, enjoy your walk, Lexa.”
A walk. That’s what I should have written so I wouldn’t make anyone suspicious.
Waving, I slow my pace so it looks less like I’m running away and more like I’m going for a walk on a beautiful early morning. And it is beautiful.
Just outside the courtyard, I lift my head and close my eyes as a mild wind plays with my hair, and the scent of primrose and tulips envelops me.
It isn’t just the day that’s beautiful. It’s this place. Wolfkeep.
“Lexa!” Ana’s voice rings out behind me, and my attention snaps back to the present.
She’ll want to know where I’m going, and she will try to stop me.
My bare feet carry me away from the courtyard, down the sloping hill and into the dense forest a few feet away. Thin cotton tangles around my legs, and I pull
my dress over my knees before it can trip me. In seconds, I’m surrounded by trees that stand tall, and songbirds weaving their high, sweet songs into the sky.
As I run, the stories Shay told me when I was too afraid to climb out from beneath the bed fill my head.
“The Clayfells aren’t the biggest wolf pack, but we’re one of the fiercest. We have a bloody history, which is why the courtyard is at the very center
and we planted trees all around to protect the heart of the pack. There are some wolves you won’t ever meet, because they prefer to stay alone deep in
the forest. But most of us live in the courtyard. You’ll meet some of them when we have our twice-weekly pack gathering.”
The desperate need to ask him if he was the fiercest wolf in one of the fiercest packs became all I could think about. As I hid under the bed, I thought of
nothing else.
When he brought me trays loaded with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the question flavored every bite. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke, and the
last before I closed my eyes to sleep.
The man comes out of nowhere.
I’m running so fast that I crash into his chest.
His strong, calloused hands grip me by the top of my arms and stop me from bouncing off him and onto the ground. But I’m not grateful. When I look into his
eyes, I wish I had fallen.
“Lexa.” My name rolls off his tongue. He doesn’t say it the way Shay does.
He says it like a threat.
I wriggle to get free.
His eyes, just like all the rest of the pack's, dip to my chest, and a smile creeps across his face. “Where’s your notepad?”
I wriggle harder, but his hands tighten around my arms.
“Did you drop it?” His gaze darts behind me. Not as if he’s looking to see if I dropped it on the way—more like he’s checking to see if I’m alone.
Dread pools in my belly.
“That’s okay. I’m sure we can find other ways to get to know each other a little better.” As he talks, he backs up into the forest, dragging me with him.
He isn’t one of the wolves Shay told me lives alone, because I’ve seen him in the courtyard. He was one of the reasons I stay in my room.
He presses my back against a tree, and his brown eyes settle on my lips. That’s when I understand how much trouble I’m in.
 I could scream and Shay would come running.
But he would take me back, and because I stayed, his pack would die. So I don’t scream. I struggle to get free.
“Now, now, Lexa.” The shifter with the sly smile and the brown hair dusted with gray steps closer, all but pinning me against the tree. “Just relax. I promise
you’ll like it.”
I kick out at him. But as if he plucked the thought from my head the second before I moved, he blocks my attack. “That wasn’t very nice, Lexa,” he says, a
smile in his voice.
Tree bark scratches my back as I fight.
His slap jerks my head to the side, and the unexpected flare of pain makes me cry out. A second later, a splash of hot tears hits my cheeks.
As they fall, he grips my wrists with both hands and forces them over my head. I’m trapped. The only one who knows where I am is Ana, and she’s a human
woman. Even if she found me now, there would be nothing she could do.
His head lowers and I struggle to get free, but his hips pin me to the tree. “Now, settle down,” he murmurs, his lips a breath away from touching mine.
With no way to fight or even turn away from the kiss, I slam my eyes shut so at least I don’t have to see.
A hard blow knocks me to the ground. I land on my hands and knees, blinking in confusion. Until a low growl makes me jerk my head up.
A white-gray wolf springs at my attacker and takes him down, his teeth at his throat. And then red. All I see is red. Lifting my hand, I brush away the blood
splashes from my cheeks as I stare, wide-eyed.
The white-gray wolf shifts, a smooth melding of a wolf into man—and then I’m staring at Shay, his body flecked with blood.
He doesn’t move for a long time. Since my fear is so sharp I can taste it, he must smell it. His eyes settle on my cheek, and a low growl rumbles from his
throat.
My heart spikes, and his eyes jerk back to mine. “It’s okay, Lexa. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
With slow, deliberate steps, he approaches until he’s close enough to touch. He pauses. When I don’t retreat, he sinks into a crouch, his eyes searching my
face. “Are you hurt anywhere else, pup?”
I want to tell him that I’m not a pup, but something about the word—or maybe it’s the way he says it—makes my eyes fill with tears.
I’m in his arms, my face pressed against his throat with no memory of how I got there.
“It’s okay. You’re safe now,” Shay murmurs. “You’re safe with me.”

Shay’s touch is light as he swipes a soft, damp cloth over my face, wiping away all traces of blood.
“I would ask what you were doing in the forest, but I have a feeling I already know,” he says, his eyes on the cloth in his hand.
I shift my gaze to the red tulips someone has painted on the bathroom wall. Do all bathrooms have flowers painted on them, or is it just mine? What flower
does Shay have on his?
After Shay carried me back to my bedroom, he told Ewan to send someone to deal with the body. Whatever that means.
This time I didn’t even have to speak and someone is dead.
“Lexa?”
Shay draws my attention back to him. Sitting on the bathroom counter with him standing in front of me doesn’t leave me with many places I can avoid his gaze.
So I meet it head-on as I wait for him to shout at me, tell me he’s locking the door now, or any number of things that reveal I was wrong to trust him.
“I need you to be safe.”
I blink at him in surprise.
What?
One corner of his lips turns up. “Yes, need.”
Because I’m his mate. What he’s feeling is only because of that. I turn my attention back to the wall. He would feel the same way—act the same way—if it
was any other woman who happened to be his mate.
He grips my chin and gently turns my face back to his. After giving me a searching look, he tosses the cloth in the sink behind me and steps closer. “If you’re
not safe, then nothing else matters. Do you understand, Lexa?”
I take in his sober expression, and I think I do.
Blood still spots his hair and covers his chest, because he didn’t stop to dress or even wipe his face. The only thing he cared about was making sure I was
okay.
There’s so much blood that it should horrify me, but it doesn’t.
I lift my fingers to touch his strong jaw, but before I can, he grows so utterly still that I know he’s stopped breathing.
Maybe he doesn’t want me to.
But one glimpse at the heat in his eyes and I know I’m wrong. He wants me to touch him, so I do. I trace his firm jaw with one finger before I turn my attention
to his mouth. The tips of my fingers whisper over his lower lip, and his soft exhale makes warm air dance over my skin.
“Lexa,” he breathes, moving closer.
I widen my legs to make more room for him, and a hardness nudges between my thighs. My eyes fly to his, and I wait to see what he will do.
He regards me steadily as his hand curves along my nape. “Yes, I want you, but that doesn’t mean you have anything to fear from me.”
When my heart slows, I realize just how fast it must’ve been beating before.
What makes you so different from the others?
He seems to read the question in my eyes.
“The most important thing to me is your safety first.” One finger brushes the tiny hairs on the back of my neck, making my breath catch. “And then I need to
know you have everything you need and want: food, water, clothes, and a warm place to sleep. Do you know what comes next?”
I shake my head no.
“Your happiness. I need you to have all of those things for my world to feel right.”
Oh.
“So,” he continues in that same easy tone, “when Ana tells me that you ran away, and I find one of my pack attacking you…” His voice trails off.
He doesn’t need to finish. The rage and the… pain in his eyes tell me everything I need to know.
I hurt him.
“Whatever reason you think you have to run away, you don’t have to. You’re safe here. I will deal with any threat. I will kill anyone who ever hurts you.
Promise me you won’t run away again.”
I can’t.
 And because I can’t, I do the only thing I can—I draw my arms around him and hide my face against his throat, my perfect place to hide.
His hand strokes up and down my back, and then combs through my hair. It never stops. It’s as if he has to reassure himself that I’m here. When he lowers his
head and touches his lips to my forehead, soft and light, I sigh because it feels good. Too good.
I wish I could stay with you, Shay. I wish I didn’t have to leave.
 3

“I t’ll be over before you know it,” Shay murmurs from behind me.
I lift my head to glare at him through the mirror.
In a black shirt opened at the collar, and his white-blond hair falling like a mane around his face, his smile is contrite. “I know I said it before, but I mean it this
time.”
After shaking my head, I return my attention to the makeup Ana laid out for me on the bathroom counter. I never had much interest in it before. Playing with
the rest of my pack in the stream or running in the forest always appealed to me more.
But that was before Ana worked her magic on me, and Shay’s mouth dropped open when he stepped into my room.
I only poke myself in the eye once with the mascara wand, but I count my task as a success, since I’ve never used it before. After returning the tube to the
counter, I’m reaching for the eyeshadow when I remember that Ana had done that first. Crap. Maybe I should’ve let her do it again.
“You don’t need to do that, pup,” Shay murmurs.
One glance in the bathroom mirror reveals him resting his head against the door, his eyes on me. “You’re beautiful without it.”
I shake my head and flip open the eye shadow palette. Men are supposed to say that.
Dad would say the same thing to Mom, but when she put on a pretty dress and did her makeup, he would spend the night so distracted that he would neglect
everyone else. Shay did the same thing to me, and I want him to be so distracted again that he forgets to talk to anyone.
But first I have to remember how Ana did my makeup. I decide on a soft pastel blue to match the dress I’ll be wearing tonight at the pack gathering.
It feels so normal that it’s like Shay and I have done this a million times before, and not just once.
As I drag the soft brush across one lid, my one opened eye connects with Shay, who still observes me, looking more relaxed than I’ve seen him before.
It’s probably because you haven’t tried to run away again.
An entire week has passed since he told me not to, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking about it.
Shay must know it too, or at least strongly suspect it, because the moment I even think about stepping outside, Ana is waiting to escort me where I want to go.
Or Ewan is there, his eyes fixed on me, asking if there’s anything I need.
And of course, Shay is there more than anyone else. Well, as much as he can be with more and more strangers spotted on the outer fringes of Wolfkeep.
Strangers who melt away the moment he sends his enforcers to investigate.
To calm the growing tension in the courtyard, Shay organized a gathering with dancing and drinking and a band made up of the most talented musicians in the
pack. It was also an opportunity to introduce me to everyone because as Shay’s mate, that makes me Luna, the highest-ranked female in the pack.
After two months spent hiding under my bed, it was long past time I showed my face.
So, Ana did my makeup and curled my hair. Shay took my hand, told me I was beautiful, and led the way through the courtyard to a large stone room he
called the hall.
And I got my first real glimpse of the Clayfell pack.
I sat at the biggest table beside Shay, and I felt all the pack’s attention on me.
Hundreds. There must have been hundreds of them, and I never knew it.
My family’s pack was so small. Just fifty. That’s when my fear began to ease. It was easy to believe that Shay’s pack would keep me safe, so I stopped
looking for more opportunities to run away—because how could I not be, in a pack of hundreds?
When Shay asked me to dance, and then the other men did too, I smiled and nodded. And kept on nodding until I thought the soles of my feet would wear
away by the end of the night.
If I’d known the gathering would last from late evening, when the sky was still a rich inky blue, into a bright early morning, and that I’d spend most of it
dancing, I would’ve stopped nodding much sooner than I did.
Shay’s hands close around my arms when I finish with the eyeshadow and return it to the counter. This time, I don’t startle or jump. I just look up.
His reflection smiles at me. “No dancing for hours.”
I raise my eyebrow. It draws a wider smile from him, which he buries when he kisses my hair. “It’s not my fault that I have the most beautiful mate in the pack,
and all the men want to dance with her.”
A familiar hardness bumps my lower back, but I don’t comment on it. Neither does Shay. My body warms more each time it happens, but since Shay never
mentions the scent of my arousal, I try not to react to the obvious sign of his.
He doesn’t look at other women when I’m around, and I’ve never heard anyone else say he had a girlfriend or lover before he found me. But he must have. As
I take in his straight sloped nose, strong jaw, and kissable lips, it hits me again that someone as handsome as Shay would never be single for long.
A smile touches his lips. “What are you thinking, pup? Your expression has me curious.”
You’d be able to spot my blush from space. That’s how bright I get. I grab my hairbrush and duck around Shay so I can finish getting ready somewhere that he
can’t see my face.
But his hands grip my hips, halting me. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
No, I can’t.
Not about the thoughts that have slowly been invading my brain, and certainly not about the dreams that I have more nights than not.
I shake my head.
His breath tickles my throat when he speaks. “If it’s—”
“Shay, quit hounding the girl and leave her to dress,” Ana interrupts.
“The girl is my beautiful mate, and I am not hounding her,” he grumbles. But despite his protest, a dimple creases his right cheek and his eyes are playful as he
walks me out of the bathroom into the bedroom, where Ana waits with a cloth-wrapped dress.
The second her gaze lands on Shay, she shoos him toward the door outside. “Go. I saw Ewan heading next door with a coat for you.”
Frowning, I turn to peer over my shoulder.
 Next door?
He blinks and steps away, his hands falling away from my hips.
Since it looks like he’s hiding something from me, I turn my questioning look to Ana. She gazes back at me without expression, so I cross over to the pad and
paper I left on my bed and write my question down: What’s next door?
I show her the pad and she snorts with laughter. “Only your mate's bedroom. That’s what.”
His bedroom?
My eyes find Shay, who gazes back at me with an inscrutable look on his face. “Yes, my room is next door.”
Despite all the things I could think of, my first thought goes to my dreams.
Sometimes I would wake with my hand between my thighs and a vivid image of Shay in my head. If I could smell my arousal in the air, so would the shifter next
door.
He would know. Shay does know.
His eyes are completely blank, but I know he’s thinking about it.
“Lexa?” Ana murmurs.
I stare at the floor, willing it to open up and swallow me whole.
“Ana, wait outside for a second.” The playful tone in his voice is gone. Now he sounds like the alpha he is—strong, confident, assured.
The soft tread of footsteps toward the door and the quiet snick announces her departure. That’s when I know it’s just us now. Me and Shay.
His steps are silent, but I feel his approach the moment before his fingers close around my chin and lift my head. “Lexa?”
I try not to meet his eyes, but his grip doesn’t let me look away.
After a moment, he sighs. “You never need to hide your embarrassment from me, pup.”
I frown at him and mouth the words. I’m no pup.
A gentle smile curves his lips. “I know. Sometimes it just slips out. I look into those big, beautiful violet eyes, and I remember how small you looked when I
found you.”
At the memory of where he found me, and how, I jerk my head away, breaking free of his grip.
He doesn’t try to hold on to me when I take a few steps away, my arms wrapped around my middle, and my eyes on the cloth bag Ana left on my bed.
In it will be another beautiful dress that will fit as if someone had made it for me. A dress that Shay is responsible for, because I can’t imagine anyone would
care as much as he’s shown he cares about me.
But no matter how pretty the clothes he gives me, or how welcoming everyone is being—has been—the guilt is always there, living in my heart. I killed my last
pack, and one day, I might still kill this one.
“Tomorrow. How about we spend the day together?”
I turn to him with a raised eyebrow, doing nothing to hide my disbelief. Shay has more responsibilities than anyone else in the pack, and endless meetings that
fill up his day. He sees me in between them, but we’ve never spent the day together. He’s too busy for that.
“I’ll make time. We’ll go to the lake.”
Lake?
The word has my ears pricking.
I haven’t swum in… too long. Far too long, but I miss the water. Sometimes Dad would take me when he wasn’t so busy. Not for an entire day, but for a
couple of hours, we would swim in a nearby stream and he wouldn’t be alpha anymore. He would just be Dad.
“You like that idea?” Shay asks, a pleased look in his eyes as if he already knows the answer.
I nod.
“Then we’ll spend the day at the lake. I’ll have Ana pack us a picnic and a blanket. We’ll swim, eat too much food, and nap for a couple of hours.”
It sounds perfect. But then I remember.
My anxiety returns because we won’t be here in the courtyard. We won’t be in the heart of the pack. It could be dangerous.
As if he can feel my unease, he crosses over to me and kisses my brow. “It’s not far from here, and you’ll be safe.”
Because the question is so important, I slip out of his grasp and pick up my pad from the bed. It’s rare that I need to use it when I’m with Shay. He always
seems to know what I want to say, or what I need.
I scrawl my question and hand the pad to him, watching as he reads it. After a couple of seconds, he lifts his head and tosses the pad on the bed before he
closes his arms around me. “How do I know you’ll be safe?”
I nod.
“Because I’ll be with you,” he murmurs. “And with me, you will always be safe.”
There’s no room for doubt in his voice, just utter belief that what he says is true. He says it in a way that makes it impossible for me not to believe him, so I
step into his body and wrap my arms around his hips.
Lowering his face to my hair, he squeezes me just a little tighter.
But first, we have to get through this gathering.
A second later, he sighs. “But first, this gathering.”
I release him so I can finish dressing—only instead of letting me go, he spins me in a small circle.
I grin up at him.
“First dance is mine,” he murmurs.
Even if I was still the girl who spoke, I wouldn’t remind him that the gathering was in the hall and not my bedroom. Or that there’s no music. I wouldn’t mention
that his beta is waiting for him in his room, and that he has to finish getting ready, or that I’m still wearing a silk robe over my slip and bare feet.
I would rest my head against his shoulder and let him dance me across my room, and hope this moment never ended.
Just like now.
 4

I dip my toes at the very edge of the lake.

Cold.
But that’s not a bad thing on a hot day.
“He’s on his way,” Ewan murmurs from behind me, though he needn’t have bothered. The howl that rang out moments before let both of us know Shay was
coming.
After he gets here from the dispute that meant he sent me and Ewan ahead with the basket of food and blanket that Ana packed for us, we’ll swim first.
Which means I’ll have to strip out of my white knee-length cotton dress, and he will watch me do it.
Anxiety flutters in my belly, enough that I rise from where I’m sitting near the water’s edge and turn to Ewan, who stands a few feet away.
As usual, Shay’s beta stands with his arms crossed, a frown of concentration creasing his brow, and his eyes always watchful, never still.
At my attention, his gaze settles on my face. “Lexa?”
I pull my pad and pen from the small pouch around my neck and scrawl a message that I show him.
His frown deepens. “I don’t think Shay will be happy if I leave you.”
I turn the page and hurriedly write another before I run out of time. Shay will be here soon. I’ll be okay.
But Ewan doesn’t move, so I return the pad and paper to the pouch and slip it over my head. Once I’ve tossed it to the ground beside me, I step out of my
sandals.
He gets the message then. “I’ll give you privacy.”
But he doesn’t say he will leave, just melts back into the trees which surround the lake.
I know he’s still there, but if Ewan said he’ll give me privacy, then he will. He’s always taken Shay’s orders to heart and his one order before we left the
courtyard twenty minutes ago was clear.
“Watch her, Ewan. No harm comes to her.”
And none has.
When I can no longer see or hear Ewan, I turn back to the lake. His scent is still there, so I know he hasn’t gone far.
Beneath the pale blue-green surface of the lake, brightly colored tiny fish dart about, almost too quick to spot. Yellow. Red. A neon striped orange one catches
my eyes before I lose it. My hands grip the hem of my cotton dress, but I hesitate.
There’s no one else here. But I should check. Just in case.
As I scan the surrounding forest, the only sounds are the fish in the water, and a soft wind blowing through the trees. With the heat of a bright spring morning
bearing down on me, it’s peaceful here. I’m alone.
Or nearly alone. Ewan isn’t making a sound from where he’s tucked himself behind a tree, but I know he’s still there, keeping watch over me.
And I’m close to the heart of the pack. Nothing will happen to me here.
It’s safe.
Before I can change my mind or talk myself out of it, I pull the thin cotton over my head and toss it on the ground beside my pouch.
I should tie my hair in a braid so it won’t dry tangled, but that will take more time than I have. In the near distance, twigs snap and leaves rustle, growing louder
with each passing second.
Shay is nearly here, which means I’ve just run out of time.
I ease myself into the lake, one step at a time, holding my breath as the cold works itself up my legs, my thighs, and eventually my hips.
Small pebbles dig into the soles of my feet, but they aren’t sharp or slippery, so I move faster, holding my arms out wide for balance. After sucking in a deep
breath, I plunge beneath the surface of the water until it covers my head. When it has, I start to count down from five.
My dad once told me that if the water feels too cold, the sooner you get in, the sooner your body can get used to the temperature. By the time you rise, it
doesn’t feel as cold anymore.
I get to number two when powerful hands grip my hips and pull me against a hard, muscled chest. Shay. The moment I break free from the depths of the water,
I draw air deep into my lungs as I smooth back wet hair from my face.
“Hold on.” His voice is a soft growl I feel against my breasts.
I slip my arms around his shoulders and my legs around his hips as he moves further into the lake until the water reaches our neck.
For several seconds we float, pressed tight against each other in silence, and then Shay strokes one hand up my back and collars my nape, his eyes never
leaving mine. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
I shrug, so he knows it’s no big deal.
“No,” he says with a line between his brows, “it matters. Sometimes being alpha is…” his voice trails off.
Hard. Never-ending. Exhausting.
I can see that it must be all of those things and more. Sometimes days would go by when I wouldn’t see Dad. Maybe others in the pack wouldn’t understand
the way I do, but being the daughter of an alpha, I get it.
Shay has the same weight on his shoulders.
Because I can’t tell him in any other way, I lean in close and kiss the line between his brow.
He stills against me, as he always does when I touch him.
Slowly, I pull my head back and take in the heat filling his eyes.
His finger brushes against the back of my nape, ruffling the tiny sensitive hairs and making me shiver. “I thought it would be me,” he murmurs.
I raise my eyebrow as I try to ignore the familiar hardness pressed flush against my lower belly. He’s naked, just as I am, which means I notice his arousal more
than usual. Especially because of the dreams.
“Kissing you.” His eyes dip to my mouth. “At least for the first time.”
 So did I.
He focuses his attention on my lips for so long that I know he’s thinking about doing it now. I can feel the need growing in him—and me—so I lick my lips. The
hand around my nape tightens and a slow burn ignites in my belly.
“But first…” he murmurs as he releases my nape and slides the one hand down my back to join the other around my hips.
I lift my gaze from his mouth.
Shay winks at me.
First what?
I’m suddenly airborne as he launches me high in the air. Laughter bubbles up my throat and pours out of my mouth as he catches me, and then dunks me.
Spluttering and laughing, we plunge into the water as his fingers find all those hidden spots that make me shriek with laughter. It’s a miracle I don’t drown.
No, it’s down to Shay pulling me out of the water long enough to catch my breath. I’m far too busy laughing to think about breathing. That and tickling him
back. Since he’s not as ticklish as I am, I take longer to find those secret places between his rips and his sides that have him laughing as he backs away.
But I do find them.
I don’t have to save him from drowning since, unlike me, he remembers to come up for air.
When he does, I splash him. I use my palm to send waves of water into his face until he dives at me and then we’re deep in the water again, tickling each other
mercilessly.
Minutes pass this way.
It could go on forever and I don’t think I’d mind it, but between one rib tickle and another, Shay kisses me.
I freeze.
His firm lips press against mine as his arms draw me against him, one hand cradling the back of my head to hold me against him. The slow throbbing pulse in
my belly flares to life as my eyes flutter shut.
My hair floats around us. It brushes against my shoulders and tickles my cheeks, but it’s a distant sort of awareness. All my focus is on the firm pressure of
Shay’s lips on mine.
When his tongue touches the seam of my mouth, I gasp in surprise, and he slips inside.
I tighten my grip around his shoulders as he strokes the tip of my tongue with his. Moaning, I move closer because it feels good. Better than good. I never want
it to stop, so I stretch out my tongue so I can do the same to him. Catching his low growl in my mouth, I swallow the hungry sound.
We sink to the bottom of the lake, and my back bumps against the pebbled ground. The taste of him fills my mouth. A mix of the coffee, bacon, and eggs we
had for breakfast together. But there’s something else. Something unidentifiable that I crave more of.
It’s him.
Shay is the thing I crave.
He deepens the kiss.
Just when I’m running out of air, Shay’s hands tighten around me, and he propels us up until we burst through the surface of the water. I can breathe again.
Gulping air into empty lungs, all I can do is hold on to Shay as he clings to me.
Finally, I focus on Shay, who eyes me with a frown creasing his brow. “Maybe a lake wasn’t the best place to kiss you.”
I study him, this man who just gave me a kiss that made me hate the fact that I needed to breathe, and I lean in close and press my lips against his brow until I
feel his frown melt away. When it has, I shift back and meet his eyes with a smile.
His lips curve in a soft smile. “Let's get out of here, before I kiss you again and drown us both.”
Laughing, we swim to the edge of the lake.
Shay steps out first before holding his hand out for mine. I take it, but hesitate when he tugs because it’s one thing kissing in the water, but I feel strangely shy
about stepping out naked.
My eyes go to the basket of food set in the middle of a large red blanket. I measure the distance. Ten steps, maybe more. And all that time I’ll be naked.
Completely naked.
I could step back into the cotton dress I was wearing before, but it’s all I brought with me, so if I do, I don’t know how long it’ll take to dry.
Shay squeezes my hand, and my gaze returns to his.
For several seconds, he searches my face. “It’s me.”
I know it’s him, but that isn’t what he means.
It’s your mate, the other half of your soul. That’s what he means. That’s what he’s saying. To hide your body from your mate doesn’t make sense when they
can see into your heart.
So the next time he tugs on my hand, I don’t hesitate. I let him pull me from the water.

With too much food in my bulging belly, I lay on my front on the blanket beside Shay.
The sun dried us both hours before, but I’m not ready to dress yet, much less move. It’s so peaceful here that I could stay here forever. Already I’m dreading
the time we have to return.
Shay’s hand glides down my back. As he strokes back up again, I turn from the sparkling water and face him.
His eyes are on me. “You have the most beautiful skin in the world.”
I shake my head and lower my gaze to his chest, a deeper tan than mine, golden and strong. After a moment, I lift my head again.
Snorting, he shakes his head. “No. It’s definitely you.”
He doesn’t just tell me I’m beautiful every day. He shows me. I see it in his eyes, the way he watches me.
It must be a mate thing.
My parents were the same, and so were all the other mated pairs in my pack. They looked into each other's eyes as if they were looking at the most beautiful
thing they’d ever seen in their lives.
“Lexa…?”
I blink and refocus on Shay. His fingers brush back the hair from my face, and I know he wants to kiss me again. I know he wants more than that.
We’ve played in the lake, eaten our fill of chicken and fruit and all the sandwiches that Ana packed for us. We’ve napped, too. Is that all we’ll do here?
And is that what you want?
When his gaze dips to my lips, I lick them. The hand on my jaw tightens, and he lowers his head to mine.
Six wolves explode from the forest. Shay and I break apart. The wolves snarl low in their throats, and I freeze. But Shay doesn’t.
He’s on his feet in a second, pulling me to mine.
 “Lexa. Go. Back to the courtyard.” He nudges me in the right direction, but he never takes his eyes off the wolves who fly toward us, their jaws gaping open,
teeth glinting white.
Shay sent Ewan away hours ago, so it’s just us. Help is waiting back in the courtyard, so I have to go.
I have to be fast.
Wheeling around, I sprint for the trees. As I run, I reach for my wolf. I can’t shift on the move like an alpha can, but once I’m in the trees, I’ll stop and do it
then.
Vicious growls erupt from behind me and I twist my head back, my hair blinding me until I shove it out of the way.
A large white-gray wolf flings himself at the six black and brown wolves, and they all go down in a mass of snarls, growls, and blood.
Is Shay hurt already?
My heart contracts and I slow, because I have to know.
Another growl, this one coming from a direction I wasn’t expecting, makes me jerk my head back around.
I skid to a stop.
Aron.
He’s here. He found me.
Everything freezes. My heart, my brain, time, all of it just… stops.
The large black wolf with blue eyes takes a step toward me, and I know I would run through fire if it meant getting free of him.
Spinning around, I sprint in the opposite direction. I have to get away from the wolf with blue eyes. I have to get away.
I plunge deep into the forest.
The wolf’s pursuit is soundless, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel him behind me.
 5

I sit with my back flush against a tree and my arms wrapped around my shaking knees.
I barely breathe.
Shift, Lexa. Shift and you can run faster. You can escape.
But I don’t, because my fear holds me still. It won’t let me move.
“Lexa?”
I press my back harder against the tree.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
“I can hear your little heart, darling.”
Oh, God.
He’s going to find me.
Sweat dribbles down the side of my face. I smell the terror in it, and I know Aron must scent it, too.
I ran for so long that I stopped hearing Shay fighting with the other wolves miles back. He could be dead already.
My teeth chatter and tears fill my eyes.
No. He’s alive. I feel it in my bones. He isn’t dead.
But he’s alone. What if—
A hand crashes down on my shoulder.
I shriek and throw myself to the right. The grip tightens, but I kick, punch, shove, and the hand falls away.
After scrambling to my feet, I take off again, back through the forest, further and further away from the courtyard. And Shay.
Deep male laughter rings out behind me. It bounces off the trees and into my face, taunting me. “That wasn’t nice Lexa. I missed your sweet voice. Come back
and sing for me.”
Tears track down my face as I run.
At the next tree, I stop and tuck myself behind it. I could keep running, but eventually, he will catch up to me whether I was a wolf or a girl.
I consider shifting anyway. That way, I have teeth and claws to fight.
Fight? You mean like you did last time?
The memory of my dad’s eyes flashes in my mind. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, but that doesn’t stop the tears.
“Lexa?” Aron calls out.
He’s closer now.
My eyes snap open. Running isn’t going to save me, so I have to use my brain.
Think, Lexa. Think.
All around me are trees, and I’ve always been a good climber.
It’s easy to grab the lowest branches of the tree at my back and pull myself up. The bark digs into my clammy palms, but the roughness helps me grip tighter.
Finally high enough that I don’t think he will see me if he were to look up, I move quickly, leaping from one tree to the next as I try to ignore Aron’s footsteps
below me.
“Lexa.” Irritation fills his voice.
He can’t find me.
Good.
I leap to the next tree.
“Lexa!” he snaps.
My fingers miss the next branch, and I suck in a breath as I fall. Don’t scream, don’t scream. I grab at anything around me. As I plunge, a branch appears in
front of my face, and I seize it with both hands.
Muscles tremble as I hold on, waiting to see if Aron heard anything.
Footsteps below continue past me, so I pull myself back up and make a seat for myself near the trunk of the tree.
There isn’t anything to hold on to, so I wrap my arms as best as I can around the wide trunk, my nose full of bark, ignoring the ants that crawl up my arms.
Some are the red ones that bite, but I don’t brush them away, not even when they burrow under my hair and tickle against my nape. I just hold on.
No ant bite could be as bad as what’s waiting for me down there.
Minute by minute, the tension that grips me falls away. My hold on the tree loosens. Every moment that passes lifts my hope, my belief that Shay will find me,
that I’m safe up here until he does.
I think of how easily he killed the man who pinned me against the tree. He shifted in a second, and then it was all over. And he’s the alpha in a pack of
hundreds. He wouldn’t be if he wasn’t the best, or if he wasn’t the strongest. He can kill those wolves and he’ll be okay.
A soft whistle drifts in the wind.
The tension returns. All of it and then some. One of my nails breaks against the tree.
That song.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I fight to hold back my tears.
The song I will never forget winds around me, choking me.
Stop. Please stop.
It all comes back. All the death and the cries.
The blood.
I grind the heel of my hand against my eyes, but it isn’t enough to silence the screams of my dying pack.
 My dad is suddenly there. He grips my arms, and his deep brown eyes stare into mine as he wills me to listen. “Go, Lexa. Run.”
I shake my head. “I can’t leave you, Dad. I won’t.”
Growls reach the door, and he turns. “Go. Now.”
Suddenly we’re outside and I can’t remember how we got there.
All around me is death.
A large wolf with reddish fur stumbles and falls. He does it slowly, like a great mountain tipping over. My eyes fill with tears, because he’s always been so
strong. Only one thing would send him to his knees.
Dad.
I lunge toward him, even though I’m a small wolf and I can’t catch him. But I have to try.
And then I’m falling.
The impact shocks me, leaving me breathless. A second later, the pain hits.
Aron’s face appears over mine. He smiles. “Careful, Lexa. Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
He reaches for me, and I cry out. At first I think that’s what stops him, but when he turns to peer over his shoulder, I realize that it’s something else.
He turns back and smiles down at me. “Don’t miss me for long, songbird.”
I blink, and then he’s gone.
The next time I blink, Shay is on his knees beside me, blood covering his body. He smoothes the hair back from my face. “Lexa…” he breathes, his eyes full of
anguish.
My head hurts so much that I lift my fingers to find out why, but his hand grips mine. “No, pup. Don’t touch.”
Frowning, I struggle to understand, until I realize it isn’t just the blood of the wolves he must’ve killed that I smell. It’s mine.
I fell out of the tree and hit my head. Hard enough that I’m bleeding.
But Shay is alive, and that’s all that matters. He’s safe.
I tug at my hand, and he releases me. This time, I don’t reach for my head. I reach for him.
He lowers his head enough that I can curve my hand around his jaw. It’s slick with blood, but his face is warm. The touch of him grounds me like nothing else
ever could.
His eyes close, and he releases a sigh. After a long minute, he grips my hand and turns it to kiss the center of my palm. “I’m going to have to move you, baby.”
I know.
He opens his eyes, and they’re filled with pain. “It’s going to hurt.”
I know that too.
“But we can’t stay here. We’re too far from the pack, and more of those wolves could come back any minute.”
I want to tell him it’s okay, that I understand. But more than that, I want to tell him to leave me—because if they come back, this time they might kill him. I
can’t let that happen.
So I lower my hand to his chest and push.
For several seconds, he stares down at me, his eyes stark with disbelief. “You want me to leave you?”
I push again.
His face hardens into fierce determination. “Pup, if you think—”
A branch snaps a few feet away, and I jerk my head toward the sound. Pain erupts from the back of my head, a deep, throbbing ache that travels outward until
no part of me doesn’t hurt. I moan in agony.
When Shay’s hands grip the side of my face, I can’t understand why I didn’t see him move until I realize my eyes are closed.
“Don’t move, pup. It’s okay, everything will be…”
As if we’re in a tunnel that’s broken apart between us, his voice drifts further and further away from me until I can’t hear him anymore. Suddenly, I’m alone in
the dark tunnel that stretches out forever.
“Shay!” I scream.
My voice echoes around me. On and on and—
 6

M y nose twitches.
The rich scent of roasting meat surrounds me. I shouldn’t be hungry after all the food Ana prepared for us, yet my stomach grumbles, telling me I
am.
My eyelids flutter open, and I don’t know if what I’m seeing is a dream or if it’s real. In the courtyard, my bedroom was a large terracotta and green room
filled with all the comforts anyone would ever need.
Every morning I’d wake to the scent of fresh flowers and plants which fill every corner of my room. Or Ana will be at my window, pushing the curtains open to
let the morning sun into the room.
I’d thought that we were back there, but as I take in the small, rustic cabin lit by candles, and the musty-smelling furs covering my naked body, wherever we
are, is not the heart of the pack.
“This is a cabin the pack can use if they want to be away from the others.”
Shay’s voice draws my gaze to the source of the heat.
Crouched in front of an open fire, with a small black pot hanging over the burning wood, a smile curves his lips. “I’m guessing you’re ready to eat?”
A blush burns across my cheeks, because I hadn’t thought my stomach had been that loud, but it must have been.
I’ve barely moved to sit up before Shay is suddenly there, his hands halting me, and a frown creasing his brow. “Careful. Let me.”
He slips his arm around my back and uses the other to steady me as he eases me into a seated position with my back resting against a wooden bed frame. His
eyes never leave my face as if he wants to make sure that nothing he does causes me any pain.
But, other than a faint dull ache at the back of my head that quickly fades, the agony that flooded my body from when I fell out of the tree is gone. Hopefully
forever.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
I smile.
He releases me and moves to get up. “Good. Let me get your—”
My hand closes around his wrist. Although my grip isn’t hard, Shay stops and turns back to me.
“What is it? Are you hurt?”
For several seconds, I do nothing but study him. Even if I was still the girl who spoke, I wouldn’t be able to find the words—not the right ones—to tell him
what this means.
He came after me. Saved me. Time has passed—enough that I’m starving, which means it’s been hours, maybe days, and he’s done nothing but care for me.
My body is clean. I’m wrapped in furs, and there’s a hot meal waiting for me. When I take in the fine lines around his eyes, I know it’s because he hasn’t slept.
Hasn’t thought of anything but me.
I slide my hand around his nape and draw him toward me.
He comes with no effort at all. When he’s close enough, I press my lips against his in a soft kiss. His response is just as gentle as if, even though I’m okay, he’s
still being careful not to hurt me.
After a moment, he draws back, breaking the kiss, and I open my eyes.
“No kissing,” he murmurs, his eyes somehow both tender and needy. “Especially not in bed.”
His fingers brush the hair from my face. “And most definitely not while you’re naked. Okay?”
Since his tone is more playful than serious, I smile and nod.
He kisses me lightly on the lips and rises. “Okay. Let's feed you.”
I watch him cross back to the fire. We were both naked by the lake, so there’s no reason he’d have clothes now. But now, as I observe him scoop a large
serving of a thick, fragrant stew into a brown earthenware bowl, I notice his lack of clothes more than ever.
My eyes take in his strong back, his ass, and his thighs and I tell myself not to look anymore. But when he’s hung the ladle on the edge of the pot, and rises, my
gaze doesn’t go to the bowl in his hand.
I’ve seen naked men before. Being a shifter means being around naked men and women when we go on runs or we’re coming back from them.
But I’ve never seen anyone like Shay before.
He’s so big. How are we going to—
“Pup?”
I rip my eyes from the evidence of his growing desire to find a half-smile curving his lips. “You look terrified.”
Face hot, I shift my gaze to the wall as he approaches. Not because I’m afraid, but because I can’t trust myself not to look again. And I want to. But not just
look—I want to touch. My fingers clench around the fur so I'm not tempted to.
His weight on the edge of the bed makes it dip, and he places the bowl on the furs in my lap. I still don’t look.
“I would fit.”
I turn to give him a doubtful look, my eyebrows raised because I don’t see how. I’m small and he’s… not.
“That’s the miracle about making love. It just works,” he murmurs, his voice husky.
The heat in the cabin shoots up another ten degrees, but I know it doesn’t come from the fire. It’s from inside me.
“But that comes later,” he adds. “After you’ve eaten and are well again. When you’re ready, and only then.”
When he picks up a small hand-carved wooden spoon from the bowl and hands it to me, I take it.
My nose told me what it was long before he brought it to me. Rabbit. But that isn’t what has me pausing before scooping up a serving. It’s how good it looks
and smells.
In my old pack, it wasn’t just the women who cooked; the men did too. What surprises me is that Shay, as alpha, knows how to.
“I promise I know what I’m doing,” he murmurs, a smile in his voice.
 There’s so much about him I want to know—that I’m desperate to ask him—and this is just one more question I add to the growing list.
How does an alpha know how to cook when he would never need to learn?
The first mouthful confirms that not only does Shay know what he’s doing, but he also does it far better than the cook in my old pack.
After scooping another serving, I hold it to his lips.
He shakes his head. “No, pup. This is yours. Eat.”
I don’t move my hand.
“Stubborn,” he murmurs, but he opens his mouth and I slip the spoon inside.
And that’s how we empty the bowl. One scoop at a time, alternating until it’s all gone.
“You want more?” Shay asks, already rising to his feet with the bowl in his hand.
Shaking my head, I lift my hand to muffle a yawn.
“Still tired, huh?”
I shake my head again, just as another yawn sneaks out.
Shay chuckles as he places the bowl on a small side table beside the bed and slips beneath the furs. “Well, if you’re not tired, maybe I could tell you a story
until you are.”
There’s a smile in his voice as he moves me closer. Before I can rest my head against his chest, I suddenly remember, and my gaze jerks toward the large
wooden door with a small latch that doesn’t look close to being strong enough to keep a determined fox out, let alone shifters.
“It’s okay. I’ve been patrolling and we’re safe.”
For now, maybe.
Dread forms in the pit of my stomach, the leaden weight getting heavier and heavier the longer I stare at the door.
Shay tugs my head against his chest and presses his lips against my brow. “You’re safe, Lexa. If you’re well enough, we can head back to the courtyard in the
morning.”
I lift my head, a question in my eyes.
Why not now?
As usual, I don’t need a notepad or words for Shay to read me. “Trampling through the forest in the pitch black hours after you’ve fallen out of a tree doesn’t
sound like a good idea. And you’re not well enough now.”
I nod.
Lowering his head so we’re eye to eye, he slides a hand around my nape. “You’ve only just stopped bleeding, pup. Not only that, you slept for hours, and at
no point during those hours were you not whimpering or crying out in pain.”
My eyes widen.
He kisses me again. “So we’re not going anywhere until you’ve rested.”
Despite his determination, I’m not convinced that something won’t happen. We’re alone here and Shay is the fighter. I will if I have to, but my instinct has
always been to run. To hide.
Even Dad knew that.
“Pup?” Shay’s fingers on my face are gentle, and his brow creases in concern. “Everything will be okay.”
Relieved he misread the reason for my sadness, I rest my head against his shoulder and force my body to relax.
Shay combs a hand through my hair, one slow stroke at a time until my forced relaxation no longer feels forced. My eyelids grow heavy.
With one arm snug around my waist and his hand playing with my hair, the crackling wood from the fire, and the scent of his skin all work to soothe me into
quiet contentment.
But I’m not ready to sleep yet. I want the stories that Shay promised me, so to show him I’m still awake, I brush my fingers against his chest, just over his
heart.
The soft sigh he releases ruffles my hair, and his arm tightens around my waist. “There aren’t many more stories about me I could tell,” he murmurs, sounding as
relaxed as I feel. “I think I told you most of them back in your room.”
Most, but not all.
“I could tell you how I became alpha, but it’s not a relaxing story.” His voice is heavy with reluctance, and I tense as I wait to see if he will tell me. “But I can
feel your questions, pup.”
How can he read me so well?
“You wondered about the stew,” he murmurs, “so I’ll start with how I grew up in the kitchen while my father ruled as alpha.”
I close my eyes and settle in for a story that’s not starting at all how I was expecting. Beneath my eyelids, an image of a small blond boy with eyes the color of
an ocean takes shape.
“Everyone knew I’d eventually become alpha. Everyone but me, that is.” He sighs. “Or maybe I did. I just didn’t want to.”
Outside, a wind blows hard enough to rattle the door, and when I tense, Shay squeezes me. “Just the wind. No one is there. My nose would warn us before
they got to the door.”
But they surprised us before.
Once again, Shay proves to be a mind reader. “And this time, I’m not about to kiss a beautiful woman who distracts me beyond all reason.”
His words warm me. I feel the pleasure snake through me, coiling around my heart, my chest, and my soul. He doesn’t just need me because I’m his mate; he
wants me too.
“I didn’t want the responsibility of being alpha. I wanted to be free, and nowhere felt freer than in the kitchen.”
It seems like a strange place to find freedom, but when I think of the manic pace, the laughter, the heat, and the scent explosion in my old pack kitchen, I
understand why he would go there.
In the kitchen, it didn’t matter where you ranked in the pack hierarchy. All that mattered was the need to feed the pack. Everyone worked together with that
one goal in mind.
Shay proves it’s not only our attraction that we have in common with his next words. “No one cared I was the heir apparent. I was just another hand to stir the
pot or chop the potatoes. I was like everyone else.”
But a life like that wouldn’t have lasted long. Not if his father was alpha. Shay would need to learn how to lead a pack as large as the Clayfells.
“Life stayed that way until I was twelve. I was carefree and wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life working in the kitchen with everyone else. I
was happy.”
My relaxation fades, because his words sound like an ending. Happiness stopped for the boy as he started on his path to become a man.
“An alpha always keeps a distance between himself and the rest of the pack. One day, you will have to kill them when they step out of line or threaten the
safety of the rest. It’s less painful to do if they are not your friends.”
I hear Shay’s voice, but the words sound like they belong to someone else.
 It must be his father who told him this.
“Those words were the start of my lessons. The rest were more painful. I…” He pauses for a beat. “I’d rather you didn’t hear those, pup.”
I squeeze him so he knows it's okay, that he doesn’t have to tell me anything that hurts.
“All the friends I played with before became strangers. We spoke in the hallway when we saw each other, but nothing was ever the same. Once I skipped my
lessons and snuck back into the kitchen, thinking I could do what I want. I knew my father wouldn’t punish me because he needed me to be alpha. And I was
right. He didn’t. It was my friends he punished, and I learned what would happen if I ever went back. So I didn’t make that same mistake again.”
In my mind, a grinning boy with blond hair and turquoise eyes hardens and grows into a man who rarely smiles, and who speaks in orders.
“When I was seventeen, my father lost an alpha challenge.”
What?
Shay snorts in amusement. “All those lessons about keeping yourself apart from everyone, of always expecting an attack to come from another pack, and the
thing that kills him is one of his own.”
What does an isolated seventeen-year-old boy who has lost all of his friends and now his father do?
Shay doesn’t leave me to ponder my question for long.
“I immediately challenged the shifter who’d killed my dad and won. And then I was alpha.”
Seventeen and an alpha of a pack of hundreds. I can’t begin to imagine what that must have felt like, especially for someone who had never wanted to be alpha
at all.
“It wasn’t easy. In a way, Dad was right. The distance between me and everyone else made it easier to punish my old friends when they fell out of line. As the
years went by, I felt myself grow colder and harder. And lonely. Most of all, I was lonely.”
But you couldn’t have been alone since you were seventeen.
“Then I met someone.”
A woman.
I’m trying so hard to steady my breaths, to hide any small reaction that will betray how I feel about Shay being with anyone, that I gasp in surprise when he
rolls until I’m on my back and he’s gazing into my face.
His eyes search mine, and moments later, a faint smile touches his lips. “I shouldn’t feel as pleased as I do that it bothers you.” The smile fades. “When I think
of anyone touching you or kissing you, I want to rip them apart with my bare hands.”
I press my hand over his heart so he knows I feel the same way.
He takes my hand and lifts it to his mouth. “No,” he murmurs against my skin, his breath tickling the sensitive skin on my palm. “I never want these soft hands
to know any violence.”
Too late.
His gaze sharpens. “But I didn’t find you in time, did I?”
With the subject veering dangerously close to a past that will haunt me forever, I study his chest so he can’t read the truth in my eyes.
“She betrayed me,” Shay murmurs.
My eyes snap back to his face.
His expression is blank, but I hear the pain in his voice. “The woman who I thought I might have a future with. Her loyalty was to her family’s pack—and to the
man she’d left behind when they sent her to tempt me.”
They did what?
Despite the pain in his eyes, one corner of his mouth turns up. “Yes, pup. You heard right.” After a moment, he continues. “Kira led me into an ambush. One I
nearly didn’t escape.”
He takes my hand and presses my fingers against his left side, just under his armpit. “Feel that?”
My fingers explore the deep groove. Even with fast shifter healing, he would have needed stitches to hold the wound together while it healed. And it would
have taken days instead of hours.
I nod.
“One man had a knife, which I hadn’t been expecting. Dad beat it into me that weapons were for humans, never for us.” He shakes his head. “He was wrong
about that, too. But this land is valuable. All my life I grew up hearing just how many shifters coveted it.”
My mind struggles to comprehend how what Shay is telling me can be true. I grew up with the same stories, that we shifters fight with tooth and claw.
We don’t use weapons.
Ever.
“I fought as a wolf, like I always do. But I didn’t see the man creeping up behind me with a blade in his hand until it was almost too late. He…” Perhaps
reading the mounting horror in my eyes, his voice trails off. “Well, he didn’t kill me.”
He tried to stab you through the heart. That’s what you don’t want to say.
And he nearly did.
“But I survived. The rest of the pack arrived, and we killed them.”
Even the woman who betrayed you?
Shay peers into my eyes and sighs. “Even Kira. It’s why no one talks about her anymore. They know what she did, and they hate her for it, just as I do.”
But that isn’t all she did. She broke your heart.
“I wish…” His voice trails off, and I curse myself that I can’t read his heart the way he can mine.
I squeeze him.
You wish what?
“Nothing, pup.” Gathering me close, he rolls again, this time with my head tucked against the hollow of his throat. “Sleep now, Lexa.”
I tell myself that I won’t sleep. That I can’t after what Shay told me about his near death.
Maybe it's this new position that makes my eyelids heavy and the sleep so impossible to resist.
But my eyes flutter shut as the warmth of the cabin, the feel of Shay’s arms snug around me, and the scent of him tickling my nose lull me into the sleep I was so
desperate to avoid before.
 7

D ead blue-green eyes stare up at me.

All around me, the courtyard lies in ruins. He’s not the only one dead, but he’s the one I focus my attention on. He’s the only one I see.
“Shay,” I whisper, wanting to move closer but unable to even breathe.
You spoke, and now he’s dead. They’re all dead. Because of you.
The thought whirls in my head. A dark whisper that never dies.
You did this.
I take a step back, shaking my head. “I didn’t do this.”
That’s what he wanted, for you to talk. He didn’t want to tell you in case it hurt you, so you spoke, and now he’s dead.
Tremors shake my body.
I spoke, and I killed Mack.
And then I hear the whistle.
The song.
No, no, no.
I clap my hands over my ears, but I can still hear it. It’s inside my head.
A twig snaps and I spin around, my eyes probing the dark ruins of the courtyard. From the treeline, a man appears. Aron. His blue eyes glint at me. “Lexa, sing
for me. I’ve missed your sweet voice.”
I turn on my heel and run.
Something trips me and I fall, getting my hands beneath me before I smash my face against the ground. I don’t waste time checking to see what it was. I
scramble to my feet and run…
Right into a door that wasn’t there before.
Behind me, I hear my name. “Lexa?”
Whimpering, my hands fumble for the handle. I tear it open and fling myself outside.
The sudden blast of icy rain shocks me, soaking my hair in seconds. It wasn’t raining before. I know it wasn’t.
A hand grips my arm. “Lexa?”
With a scream, I yank my shoulder free and take off.
Half-blinded by rain, my hair, and my fear, I run faster than I know I should in a storm.
I dart around trees and sprint through the forest with the utter certainty that he’s just a step behind me. That he’s so close, it’s only a matter of time before he
catches me.
Run faster. You have to run faster.
It’s the fear that makes me miss the ditch until my ankle is already in it.
One sharp jerk and I’m falling.
Although I get my arms out in front of me, it doesn’t soften the impact when I crash to the ground.
My ankle screams in agony, but I bat my hair out of my face and push myself to my feet.
A hard body drops on top of me, pinning me to the ground. I scream and don’t stop screaming until I realize Aron isn’t killing me, but talking.
“Lexa, pup. It’s me. It’s Shay.”
Shay? How can…?
Lying with my face an inch from being mired in wet earth, I angle my head to the right, and my gaze collides with a man with blue-green eyes that are alive and
not dead. That’s when I realize what must have happened.
A dream.
No. A nightmare.
One of the worst I’ve ever had in my life.
I sag, my body boneless with relief.
He’s okay. Shay is okay. I didn’t kill him.
It takes a long time for my breathing to return to normal. But when it does, Shay brushes wet hair from my face. “I’m going to get up now, okay?”
I nod.
He moves slowly, as if he doesn’t believe I won’t try to run again, but I keep still and he moves a little faster.
The shame of it hits me then. What I did. Running naked through the forest…
As soon as he’s shifted his weight off me, I roll on my side away from him and cover my face.
How could I not know it was him? My mate?
Shay moves around me. Even with my eyes closed, I know the moment he crouches beside me. “Lexa? Pup, it’s okay.”
No. It’s not.
I had a nightmare, and I—
Awareness hits with the force of a punch, and I gasp, ripping my hands away from my face. I struggle to my feet, my eyes everywhere at once because we’re
in danger. We have to be in—
Shay’s hands grip my arms, halting me before I can rise. Despite the heavy rain soaking us, he looks as calm as always. “We’re safe.”
My eyes search his face just to make sure he’s not just saying it because it’s what I want to hear. At the same time, I cast my senses out. It takes a painfully
long time before I can trust my nose and my ears.
Aron isn’t waiting close by, ready to attack. No one is around.
 Even the wild animals have sought shelter in a storm as fierce as this.
But that’s just luck. I could’ve run straight into danger and Shay would have followed. I could have led him to his death.
“I’m going to pick you up now. Okay?” Shay waits for my response.
Wanting him to just leave me here for being stupid enough to do something so reckless, I close my eyes and nod.
He slides his arm around my back and the other under my thighs before lifting. As he does, my ankle flares with sharp, hot pain. I choke back my cry and turn
to press my face against his throat, hoping he doesn’t notice.
When he says nothing, I think maybe he hasn’t.
It isn’t until he’s carried me back to the cabin—a further distance than I’d expected—and settled me in a chair in front of the low burning fire, all without saying
a word, that I realize something is wrong. Shay never goes that long without talking to me.
The only time he was this silent was when he was cleaning my face in the bathroom after I ran away.
He moves away just long enough to grab a fur from the bed and wrap it around my shoulders before dropping to a crouch in front of me. “How bad does it
hurt?”
I keep my eyes on my lap.
“Lexa?”
Shaking my head, I will him to just drop it. I wish I had my pad so I could tell him I just want to go to bed. In the time I’ve been with the Clayfells, I’ve learned
how much easier it is to lie when you don’t have to worry about anyone hearing it in your voice.
He rests his hand on my knee. “Lexa, look at me.”
There’s an order in his voice I’m not used to hearing when he speaks to me, so I lift my gaze from my knees.
For several seconds, he studies me in silence. “It’s okay to have a nightmare that scares you. You did nothing wrong. No.” He shakes his head. “There was
one thing you did wrong.”
Run outside and nearly get us both killed?
“You tried to hide your hurt from me.”
I blink in surprise.
“Don’t do that again. Not with me, okay?”
After a moment, I nod.
His expression softens. “Good. Now let's have a look at this ankle.”
And he does.
His touch is gentle as he examines me. “It’s a bad twist,” he murmurs with his eyes still on my swollen ankle. “I’ll wrap it for you so it doesn’t hurt if you knock
it in bed.”
In a couple of hours, likely even less than that, my ankle would’ve healed already, so him wrapping it is only making more work for himself. After waking to
find his mate running naked out of the cabin, and then having to chase her down and carry her back, he’s done enough. More than enough.
If I didn’t know by now how much Shay cared, I would now.
It doesn’t take him long to grab a shirt someone must’ve left behind and tear it into strips, which he uses to wrap my ankle. The tight pressure makes me suck
in a sharp breath, but the pain doesn’t last long.
The process can’t take more than a few minutes. But by the time he’s rising from his crouch, I’m losing my battle to stay awake. I don’t know what time it is,
nor how much sleep I had before my nightmare, but it doesn’t feel like I had nearly enough.
“Nearly done, and then you can sleep,” Shay murmurs before pressing his lips against my brow.
I don’t understand what else he means until he grabs a thin brown towel from a wooden chest at the bottom of the bed and sets to work wiping the rain and
mud from my face and hair.
When he sinks into a crouch in front of my chair and his eyes drift to my body, my hands tighten around the fur that I’m holding closed around me.
“Lexa?”
All he wants to do is wipe the mud and the dirt from me. I know that. But the same shyness that invaded my body at the lake rears its ugly head. Shay says
nothing else, just waits with the towel in hand.
Keeping my eyes on his face, I release my death grip on the fur and let it fall to my waist.
I hold my breath when he lowers his gaze. Heat fills his eyes as he brushes my hair behind my shoulders, and the tension gripping me eases enough that I can
breathe.
He wants me.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmurs, a note of wonder in his voice. “I can’t believe you’re mine.”
His words touch my heart. They blast away all my lingering embarrassment about a body I’ve never viewed as anything but ordinary, and I smile.
He smiles back.
There’s something about his smile—or maybe it’s the coziness of the cabin, or it’s just him—but it seems the most natural thing in the world to kiss him.
The same heat fills his eyes, so I know he must be thinking of it too.
When he leans toward me, I lick my lips in preparation for his kiss.
But the second before his lips touch mine, a wide yawn nearly cracks my face in two.
As his husky laugh fills the room, heat burns my cheeks.
A second away from him kissing me, and I yawn in his face.
Great, Lexa. Just what a guy wants in a woman.
Still chuckling, he sets to work drying my body. “Kisses later,” he says. “Sleep now.”

Maybe it’s the cold that wakes me. Maybe it’s the fact I’m alone in bed.
A frown creases my brow, because I didn’t think Shay would leave me, especially without telling me where he was going.
But as I sit up and my fur slides down, the cold makes me grab for them, shivering already.
The fire, which burned so hot and bright the night before, is dark and cold.
Now Shay’s absence makes sense.
If he woke and found that the fire had gone out, he would go and collect wood so I wouldn’t wake up cold. I know Shay enough that he wouldn’t have
wanted to leave me alone for long.
But that could have been five minutes ago, or an hour.
 What if something happened to him?
The thought pulls me from the warm bed.
My toes curl up at my first contact with the chilly stone floor. It’s so cold that if I didn’t have a reason to climb out of bed, I wouldn’t. I’d stay cozy and warm.
But Shay is outside somewhere, and I need to make sure he’s okay.
When I put pressure on my twisted ankle, it doesn’t even twinge anymore, so I know I can take the bandage off.
But after. Once I know where Shay is.
At the door, I pause, hesitating about taking the fur with me or shifting so I can move faster.
He’s okay, so you don’t need to shift. Just take the fur and go.
So I pull the door open and step outside into a bright and crisp morning.
The bite in the air chases away the last remnants of sleep, and I’m fully awake as I scan the forest. With the ground still wet and raindrops dripping from the
trees, it doesn’t take long for me to work out that Shay probably would have had to venture further into the forest to find dry wood.
But that’s okay. His scent is easy to track, and if it wasn’t, his large footsteps point to the right, so that’s where I head.
My feet sink into the wet earth as I retrace his steps. The soil isn’t unpleasant, just cold, so I move a little faster. Minutes later, rustling up ahead tells me I’m
not far.
The closer I approach, the louder the rustling and the deeper my frown, because collecting firewood shouldn’t produce that much sound.
And then I smell them. Wolves. But no ordinary wolves. Shifters.
Panic grips me. I drop the fur and run, hoping I’m not too late.
As I run, my footsteps merge with several wolves' paws stamped on the soft soil. There have to be four. Maybe five.
In seconds, I emerge from the forest and into a small clearing.
The sight of a white-gray wolf in a fight for his life against five others stops my heart.
But as I watch, the snarling white-gray wolf lunges. The wolves retreat, but only a step. All too soon, they regroup and spring at Shay. One darts for his
shoulder, but Shay jerks out of the way and delivers a devastating bite that the brown wolf can’t dodge fast enough.
The brown wolf stumbles back, blood pouring from his throat. He manages a few wobbly steps before dropping heavily to the ground. Once he’s down, he
doesn’t move again.
Shay killed him.
With one wolf dead, the others are now more wary of Shay, but they don’t run away. They continue to circle him, their lips pulled back from their sharp,
glinting teeth.
A black wolf darts toward him. Shay swipes a paw, and his claws open up the wolf’s throat. Bright red blood flows, and the wolf staggers back.
I release a slow breath.
It’s okay. He’s going to be okay.
No sooner has the thought crossed my mind than I spot a dark brown wolf slinking out of the forest opposite me. One glimpse into painfully familiar blue eyes
and I stop breathing all over again.
Dead blue-green eyes.
Shay dead.
I’m going to watch my nightmare happen right in front of my face.
Suddenly I’m breathing too hard, too fast, and I can’t stop. My eyes dart from the creeping wolf to Shay fighting, his back to the wolf, and then back again.
He doesn’t know. Shay doesn’t know Aron is there.
I step forward. My movement must draw Aron’s attention, because he turns to me and shows me his teeth. After that one glance, he turns back to Shay.
It was one look. One second. But it was more than enough. He’s going to be the one to kill Shay. The other wolves are just a distraction.
I could shift, and then—
Fight him?
How?
He’s an alpha and you’re… just a small wolf that Shay mistook for a pup.
You would never win.
The wolf slinks closer, and Shay, so focused on the three wolves in front of him, never turns his back.
It doesn’t matter if I lose. I have to help.
I’m embracing my wolf so I can shift when Aron moves faster, his body low to the ground, his eyes laser-focused on Shay.
Oh, God.
I won’t have time to shift and get there in time. I can only do one thing: shift or run. So I run.
Halfway there, Shay turns to me, surprise filling his eyes. And that’s when Aron strikes.
I don’t think.
I can’t.
“Behind you, Shay!” I scream. “He’s behind you.”
An entire season has passed since I used my voice. It’s rusty and hoarse with disuse, but Shay hears me, and he spins around. So the bite meant for his neck
closes around his shoulder instead.
Seconds later, they break apart, snarling as they stare each other down. I’ve never seen two alphas fighting each other, but what I’m about to witness is going
to be brutal. I feel it in my bones.
Shay lunges at Aron. Instead of leaping toward him, Aron wheels around and speeds back the way he came.
My mouth falls open.
Aron isn’t the only one leaving. The other wolves melt into the forest, leaving two wolf bodies still bleeding on the ground.
It has to be a trick.
Shay must be thinking the same thing, because he doesn’t pursue them. But it’s no trick. Branches snap, and the scent of the wolves fade as they move further
and further away until I can’t hear them anymore.
“Lexa?”
My eyes snap to Shay.
He’s shifted, and blood pours down his shoulder from Aron’s vicious bite. If he’s in pain, I see no sign of it on his face. Wonder makes his eyes wider than
when he first found me lying under the bodies of my dead pack. “You can speak.”
I stare at him as the full impact of his words hit me.
I spoke, and no one died.
The strength leaves my body in a rush.
 A second later, Shay is on his knees in front of me, his hands framing my face, and brows creased with concern. “Are you hurt?” he murmurs. “Where? Tell me
where.”
Tears of relief choke me so that I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. I throw myself at him, burying my face against his throat.
 8

“I killed my pack.”
Shay doesn’t ask me how I did it. He just waits.
It took a long time before I could finally stop crying, but when I did, we walked back to the cabin.
The room is still just as cold as it was before, but even if Shay hadn’t wrapped us in furs from the bed, I still wouldn’t have felt the chill. After what nearly
happened in the clearing—after Aron nearly killed Shay—all I feel is numb.
More blood drips from the bite on his shoulder, but it’s healing. Slower than I would like, but it is healing. I dab at the fresh blood with a damp cloth.
“That’s why I stopped talking.”
“Lexa?” Shay murmurs. “Look at me.”
I’ve avoided his gaze since the clearing, finding any excuse to look away. All during the walk back, I stared at the ground. Back in the cabin, I fixed my
attention on the wall, and when he agreed to sit in the chair in front of the dead fire, I settled on my knees and focused my eyes on his wound.
Shay must have known what I was doing, but he hasn’t pushed once. Now, his fingers grip my chin and gently lift my face to his.
His eyes are soft as they study me. “I refuse to believe that’s true.”
Grasping his wrist, I tug until he releases me before lowering my head again. “It’s true.”
The next several seconds pass in silence, but I feel his attempts to read me. “You’re pulling away from me.”
I don’t deny it.
“Was this why you ran away before? You think you’re responsible?”
“I am.”
“Lexa, you’re—”
“No!” I jerk my gaze to his. “Look what happened. I brought them here. It would be better if…” my voice trails off because I hadn’t intended to say any of
this.
“You left?” Shay’s voice is a whisper so low that I barely hear it.
But I feel the impact of his words as if he’d roared them.
I nod.
“Lexa—”
“No, Shay. It’s not safe for your pack if I stay.”
“Lexa. I—”
The door bursts open. Shay is on his feet and in front of me in a second. But the tension radiating up his back eases at the sight of a light brown wolf who
immediately shifts.
I haven’t seen the brown-haired and green-eyed man with laugh lines around his mouth before, but he has to be pack if Shay isn’t treating him like a threat.
“Daniel, where’s Ewan?” Shay demands.
“Alpha. He’s back at the courtyard.”
Shay sighs. “There’s going to be a reason no one came to discover why we didn’t return yesterday, isn’t there?”
Daniel nods. “There was an attack.”
I rise from my knees and turn to face the cold fireplace, folding my arms across my chest. Shay glances at me, but he doesn’t ask me what’s wrong.
“Is everyone alive?” Shay asks.
“Yes. There have been some injuries, but we’re holding them back.”
“Who?”
Aron.
Why Aron would organize an attack back at the courtyard when he knows I’m not there doesn’t make sense. But maybe he expected me and Shay to be
there and sent his men to attack, only to stumble over us beside the lake on our spontaneous picnic.
“Don’t know, but there’s a lot of them. And they’re vicious. They targeted the women and children first.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“And?” Shay’s voice is chilling.
“We pushed them back. They sent a message that all we needed to do was send one person out, and they would leave. It wasn’t even a member of our pack
they wanted.”
Me.
“What did Ewan say?” Because of course, since the alpha isn’t there, it’s the beta in charge.
“If they made the same demand again, they wouldn’t survive it.”
“Good.” Shay doesn’t sound surprised by Ewan’s response, but I am. I hadn’t expected any loyalty from his beta when I’ve spent more time hiding under my
bed than I have getting to know the rest of the pack.
“I tracked you here, but if I did it…” Daniel’s voice trails off.
“Others can,” Shay finishes. “So we’ll move. We were going to return to the courtyard this morning, but it sounds like it’s a good thing we didn’t.”
“Or I could leave,” I say as I turn from the fireplace, ignoring Daniel’s eyes widening in surprise when I do. “I could go with them, and then the attack would
end.”
Again, Shay glances at me, but his next words aren’t for me. “What are their numbers like?” he asks.
“At least a hundred. Maybe more, and they know what they’re doing.”
My eyes widen. A hundred?
Where did Aron get that many men from?
 “We’ll move now. I’m assuming Ewan has all the women and children tucked away?”
Daniel nods. “It was the first thing he did. They’re all protected.”
“How soon does he think he can deal with them?” There’s not an ounce of doubt in Shay’s voice that Ewan can handle things without him.
Hearing the absolute certainty makes me feel a little more hopeful the pack will survive, and that they won’t suffer the same fate as mine did.
“Depends how hard you want us to push. That’s part of the reason I’m here. He can go hard, but that’s going to involve taking some risks. He thought you
would say—"
“Hard.” Shay’s voice is all growl. “Don’t worry about leaving even one alive. In fact, I’d prefer it if he didn’t.”
A dark smile curves Daniel’s lips. “That’s almost word for word what he said. If hard is what you want, Ewan said it would take a day, maybe a little more.”
“Do it. Lexa and I will move now. You can clear our tracks before returning to the pack. Tell him to send men—only when the fighting is over—to the east
forest cabin. He knows the one. You got that?”
“Yes, alpha.”
“Lexa?” The order in Shay’s voice compels me to turn to face him.
“Shift. We’re moving now.”
I frown. “Shay—”
Two steps and he’s in front of me, his hands gripping my arms. “No arguing. You remember those three rules I told you about?”
My brow creases in confusion.
“Safety is number one.”
Mine. That’s what he means.
But I can’t agree. Not when he should be with his pack, and I should be… somewhere else. Somewhere I won’t be a threat to him.
“Shay…”
He cradles the back of my head with one hand, holding me close. “This is non-negotiable, pup. Shift. We move in the next five minutes.”
I still don’t agree, because people are going to get hurt because of me. Some of his pack could die. Because of me.
He must read my visible reluctance, because he gives me a hard but brief kiss on the lips. “Everything will be fine. The pack knows how to defend itself, and so
do I. Everything will work out.”
Then why does the weight in the pit of my stomach make me think something will go wrong?
When Shay crosses over to give Daniel another message to pass on to Ewan, I do what I didn’t want to do. I shift so we can go to another cabin. Maybe one
that’s easier to defend than this one.

We run for most of the day.

The sky is turning dark when we finally stop in another part of the forest, one that’s even further away from the courtyard.
By then I’m so exhausted that only my determination not to let Shay down or put him in danger is what’s kept me going.
From our twisty run, I know we’ve gone back on ourselves at least four times, all to throw off any signs of pursuit and to confuse Aron if he tries to track us.
Confused when I don’t spot any cabins, I assume we’re just stopping for a break because Shay can tell how tired I am.
Once he’s shifted, he crouches in front of me and runs his hand down my back. I can’t remember the last time anyone stroked my fur, but I’m positive it didn’t
feel as good as the way Shay does it.
Sighing in pleasure, I move closer so he can do it again.
His lips curve in a smile, and he repeats the firm stroke. “You like it, huh?”
I nod.
“I’ll do it again later if you want, but since you’re tired and hungry, it can wait until I’ve got you settled inside.”
Again, I glance around for this mysterious cabin and see nothing but trees. Not until Shay points one finger up.
So I look up. And up.
Through the trees, I glimpse something that shouldn’t be there. Something I never would’ve believed had Shay not pointed.
A treehouse.
No wonder Shay thought this would be the safest place for us.
“You ready to shift?” he asks.
Turning from the treehouse cabin, I nod.
He scratches the back of my neck before he drops his hand, but he doesn’t move away.
My shift is almost as fast as his. And in seconds I rise to my feet, but Shay’s hand on my arm stops me from heading toward the tree.
I angle my head toward him.
“You shift fast.” His expression is impossible to read. “As fast as I do.”
It’s the reason I never shifted around strangers. My speed leads to questions, and I’ve learned how dangerous answers can be.
“So?” I ask, trying to keep my face blank.
Shay studies me for another long moment, having forgotten his urgency to get inside the cabin. “And have you always?”
How can I answer without telling him something I shouldn’t?
Stick to one-word answers. Keep things vague.
“Yes.”
“And your parents? Did they—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I interrupt.
Silence.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay. We won’t talk about it. You need me to carry you?”
After shifting my focus from him, I examine the best route to scale the tree. The lowest branches are just low enough for me to reach, which is always the
hardest part of climbing. “No,” I murmur, as I start toward it. “I can manage.”
But Shay closes his hands around my hips and lowers his mouth to my ear. “I was hoping the answer would be yes,” he murmurs.
I turn to meet his eye. “Why?”
His gaze dips to my lips. “Because it would be an excuse to hold you.”
A vivid image of my body wrapped tight around Shay as he climbs the tree flashes in my mind, and a hot flush sweeps over my body. “Oh.”
He lifts his gaze back to my eyes. “Yes, oh.”
 I want to tell him I changed my mind, and for a second I almost do.
But then I remember what’s happening back in the courtyard.
Men went there looking for me, and they attacked women and children. They might again. Unless I do something about it.
So I tear my gaze from Shay’s and turn back to the tree. “Well, you don’t need to. I can climb it.”
Shay is silent, and I know he couldn’t have missed the coolness in my voice. He accused me of pulling away from him before, but now I let him hear it in my
tone.
Maybe the reason he doesn’t say anything is because Daniel is still a silent presence at my back, but he releases my hips and takes a step away. “Okay, Lexa. I
have a couple of things I have to talk about with Daniel, and then I’ll be right up.”
I make my way to the tree and reach for the first of the branches. As I pull myself up, I’m conscious his eyes are following my route up.
It’s not a difficult climb, and in less than a minute, I reach the treehouse itself and push open a small wooden door.
I’d expected something similar to the cabin we left behind. But the room I step into isn’t cozy and rustic, but a wide-open and airy space with windows on all
sides, a large silver tub set beside a fireplace, a spacious kitchen with wood counters, and a bed covered with actual sheets instead of fur.
The last of the daylight spills in through the open windows, enough for me to spot a door tucked in a corner that must lead to the bathroom.
For the longest time, the tree branches that weave in and out of the windows as if they’ve become part of the cabin, hold me transfixed.
As I wander the space, I try to absorb everything, but it’s so amazing that I can’t believe someone could build a house like this in the trees.
When Shay’s footsteps announce his arrival, he finds me with my head in the fireplace.
“Are there other cabins like this one?” I angle my head back further and lose my balance.
His hands close around my hips. “Not like this one. Careful.”
After I’ve backed out of the fireplace, I turn to face Shay. “Isn’t it dangerous to set a fire in the trees?”
“It’s safe. This cabin is Ewan’s passion project, and he’s spent more years than I can count on it. The iron grates keep the fire contained, so it’s just as safe
having a fire here as it is on the ground.”
I want to wrap my arms around his shoulders.
“Oh, that’s clever.” To stop him from reading my growing need, I turn away. “There’s even a kitchen.”
I feel his eyes searching my face. “There is. You hungry?”
My gaze returns to his. “You cooked before. I could do it. I know how.”
“It’s my job to take care of you, so there’s no need. I’ll do it.”
“Is it?”
He kisses my brow. “It is. Why don’t you explore and I’ll make us some food?”
“And you’re sure I can’t—”
“Yes, I’m sure. Explore.”
 9

A hand burrows between my thighs. The fingers are confident and knowing.
But not just any hand.
Shay’s hand. I know because it’s always him.
Moaning, I open my thighs wider and his fingers dip inside me.
“Lexa?” His low growl makes the pleasure more intense than before.
This is the first time he’s spoken. Usually, he touches me until I’m panting but never says a word.
His fingers brush against the bundle of nerves that make me arch my back and moan louder. I want to ask for more, but like all the times before, I’ve never
needed to say a word.
He just knows.
“Lexa?” His voice is husky with need.
“Hmm?” My release beckons even closer.
“Lexa, baby. You have to stop.” A thread of desperation creeps into his voice. “Pup?”
He never speaks to me here. And if he did, he wouldn’t call me pup. Because Shay only ever calls me that when I’m—
My eyes snap open and connect with Shay’s heated gaze as he lays over me, resting his weight on one elbow.
Moonlight streams in through all the windows, and that’s when I know, that’s when it hits me that this was a dream. Another one.
About a second later, I realize where I have my hand.
I yank my hand free as my cheeks burn hotter than they have in my entire life. And when the scent of my arousal fills my nose, I close my eyes because the
embarrassment—the shame is too much.
“While I’m relieved it’s not another nightmare,” Shay murmurs in the same husky, need-filled voice. “I’m curious about what you were dreaming about.”
I squeeze my eyes tighter and turn my face away. “Nothing.”
“Lexa…”
Since it’s as impossible to talk about this as it is to look at Shay, I edge to the side of the bed and hope I can find some dark corner where I can hide.
I don’t make it off the mattress because Shay closes his hand around my hip and doesn’t let go. “Lexa. Open your eyes.”
“No.”
“Pup…”
My eyes snap open. “Don’t call me that,” I cry. “It feels wrong when you just—” I stop because it wasn’t him that was touching me. It was me.
All this time, it was me.
His gaze pierces me. “I just, what?”
Swallowing hard, I lower my gaze to his chest. “Nothing.”
He’s silent for so long that I don’t think he’ll speak. “Lexa. I’m going to ask you a question. No matter how embarrassed you are, I need you to answer me.
It’s a yes or no question. Can you do that?”
Because his tone is so serious, I lift my head and nod.
“Good,” he murmurs. “Now. These dreams…”
A searing blush prickles my cheeks and I start to look away again, but his hand on my chin turns my face right back to his. “Lexa…”
That’s all he says. Just my name. I let out a slow breath and nod to show him I’m ready for his question.
“In these dreams. Am I there, or is it someone else?”
I blink up at him in confusion. When I see the tension in his jaw, I understand what he’s saying, and what he’s thinking.
Jealous.
Shay thinks I’m dreaming of someone else. And with that one question, the heat of my embarrassment doesn’t burn as hot as it did moments ago.
I lift my hand to touch his jaw. He stills, as he always does when I do. “That wasn’t a yes or no question,” I say with a small smile.
He stares at me without expression, and then he barks out a laugh. “You’ve been hiding a sense of humor from me, haven’t you?”
I shake my head. “Not really. Not like…” My voice trails off. “There were funnier people in my pack.” I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about what
happened to my family. “But it’s you,” I say in a quiet voice. “It’s always you in those dreams.”
The tension in his jaw eases. “You can laugh if you want. An alpha jealous of—”
Already I’m shaking my head no. “I would never laugh. Not at you.”
“And I wouldn’t laugh at you.”
Silence falls between us.
It’s only when I remember all the things he made me feel in my dreams that I finally look away. “Anyway, you could probably guess what my dreams were
about.”
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But I think I would like you to tell me. If you want to.”
“Why do you want to know?” I ask, as my eyes focus on a tree growing in through a window. “It’s just a dream.”
“It made you feel good, and you know how I feel about that.”
I turn to him. “What?”
“That it’s the most important thing in the world. And if I can do that for you, I would. In real life instead of in a dream.”
My mouth goes dry, and I shake my head. “I don’t know—”
“Was it the same as the dreams back in the courtyard?”
After a pause, I nod.
“Tell me.”
 His eyes will me to speak, and even though the embarrassment still lingers in my mind, I want to tell him. Some part of me wants him to know. “Sometimes I
would wake with my hand…” My voice trails off and I can’t bring myself to finish my sentence.
“You would wake with your hand where?” But the flash of knowledge in Shay’s eyes tells me he knows exactly where I had my hand and why.
I lower my gaze to his chin because I can’t look him in the eye and say it. “Between my legs.”
His fingers grip my chin and angle my head up. “Because of the dreams?”
I nod.
“And what would happen in these dreams?” he murmurs, again with a knowing light in his eyes.
I swallow. “You would touch me.” Although I try to look away, his fingers tighten so I can’t.
“And is that all I do? Touch you between your legs?” his voice is so husky that I know he must be thinking about doing it.
I clamp my thighs together but it does nothing to ease the ache building inside me.
“Lexa?”
I shake my head no.
“What else do I do?”
“You put your mouth…” I run out of breath, or maybe I just can’t bring myself to say the words out loud.
But Shay knows. How could he not?
“Where would I put my mouth?” his voice is huskier than I’ve ever heard it before.
“Between my thighs,” I whisper.
“Just my mouth?”
I shake my head no. “Your tongue.”
He shifts against me, and I feel him throb against my belly. “What happens then?”
“I feel…” It’s impossible to explain. “I never want you to stop.”
“And do I?”
I swallow hard. “I don’t know. That’s when I wake up.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
“And your breasts,” he murmurs, as his hand slides down the side of my face. “Would I ever touch you there?”
I try to think back, but I can’t. Not when he’s gazing down at me with eyes that burn. His hand gently closes around one breast, the pad of his thumb brushing
my nipple. “Yes,” I gasp.
“Like this?”
My eyes go to his and I know what he’s thinking. I know what will happen if I don’t stop this. With my panic rising every second, I grip his wrist and pull. “I
can’t do this.”
Instantly he moves his hand and lowers his face so we’re sharing the same air. “Tell me, baby.”
“It’s too much.” I force my breath out. The sound is overly loud in the quiet room. “You make me feel too much.”
“Breathe,” he murmurs, his lips against my brow. “Just breathe.”
I drag air deep into my lungs and repeat it over and over. Bit by bit, my ragged breaths slow until I don’t feel like I’m choking anymore.
When my breathing is once again normal, he lifts his head. His eyes search mine. “And is that a bad thing? To feel?”
I think of all the death I left behind. Deaths that were my fault. “Yes.”
If I open the door to pleasure, pain and guilt will follow. And they will drown me.
“Lexa…?”
I push at his chest. “I don’t want to do this. Please move.”
“You want to run away.”
“I don’t—” His eyes dare me to lie. “I need to use the bathroom.”
It’s another lie, but a smaller one. He knows it as well as I do, but he doesn’t challenge me on it. His hands fall away, and I scramble to the edge of the bed
before pushing myself to my feet.
His voice stops me when I’m halfway to the tiny bathroom in the corner of the room. “About your dreams...”
“What about them?”
When the bed sheets rustle, I turn back to find him sitting up, his eyes locked on me. “I dreamt something similar.”
My mouth is dry, so I lick them. His eyes darken as they track the motion. “Similar how?”
He lifts his head. “I would touch you, and I would kiss you,” he murmurs.
“And then?”
“I would never stop. That’s the difference.”
His words, or maybe it’s the heat in his eyes—the promise in them—chase me across the room and to a place I can hide, for at least five minutes. The thoughts
follow.
 10

“A nd you’re sure no one will see me?” I ask with my gaze on the steamy bath.
“Oh, you’ll definitely attract attention,” Shay murmurs from beside me.
I turn to him with a frown. “Then no, I don’t think—”
His lips twitch. “Attention of the bird persuasion.”
I stare at him. “Birds?”
He wraps an arm around my waist and hauls me closer. “Birds. We are in a treehouse, after all.”
“You have a hidden sense of humor as well, don’t you?”
“Just a touch, maybe. Ewan would disagree.”
And just like that, my playful mood evaporates and my smile fades. “Do you think they’re all right?”
“I think they’re fine.” Shay buries a kiss in my hair. “Ewan knows the strengths of everyone in the pack, and they will follow his lead while I’m not there. They
will be fine, and you will be safer here and not there.”
“You haven’t asked me why they want me,” I whisper against his chest.
Since Daniel left after hunting a rabbit for us, all Shay’s focus has been on keeping me fed and comfortable. He could’ve asked me when we first got to the
treehouse, but he didn’t. There’s been no question or even the hint of one.
This morning, after I woke to a breakfast of the leftover stew Shay made the night before, I sat through the meal waiting for him to ask because it’s important.
His pack is fighting a battle they don’t have to. Because of me.
As alpha, he should want to know why.
“I don’t ask because it’s not important.”
I peel my face from his chest and stare up at him in disbelief. “It’s not?”
His expression is serious but firm. “What matters is they threaten the pack and they threaten my mate. The reason doesn’t matter. They will die for it. Ewan and
the others know that.”
“But they don’t know me.”
“You’re my mate, and Luna, which makes you pack. That’s all they need to know.” His gaze dips to the bath. “Water’s getting cold.”
I stiffen my spine. “I think you should get in first.”
A frown creases his brow. “Pup, I prepared it for you. A soak in the bath will make you feel good, and you know that’s the biggest part of my job.”
“What are the other parts?” I ask, knowing full well it’s another attempt to distract me from everything that could be happening back in the courtyard.
“Making you laugh ranks pretty highly,” he murmurs, “and creating opportunities for you to kiss me is always a priority.”
My gaze dips to his mouth. “I like that last one.”
“You do?” he asks, his voice husky. “Funny you should say that because that one is a favorite.”
He leans toward me, but before his lips touch mine, he stops and pulls back with a reluctant sigh. “But bath first. I think Ewan left some clothes here,” he turns
to walk away, “I’ll hunt them out while you—”
I close my hand around his wrist. “Wait. It’s a big bath. We can share.”
When he speaks, his voice is strained. “Lexa, that might not be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
After releasing a heavy breath, he turns. I glimpse the heat in his eyes, and I can guess what he will say before he does. “It’s getting harder to want to stop at a
kiss.”
Oh.
I clear my throat. “Because of last night?”
He shakes his head. “Because it’s you. Everything about you calls to me.”
“You do too,” I admit in a low voice. “Is it like this with all mates?”
He shrugs. “Maybe for some. My dad wasn’t like this with my mom before she died.”
“What was he like?”
“Well,” Shay drawls, “let’s just say that the only thing that mattered to him was the pack. Nothing else.”
I search his face as I try to read how that made him feel, but there’s no outward change to his expression. Even when he told me stories as I hid under the bed,
he never mentioned his mom, so she must have died when he was young or her death was too painful for him to want to bring it up.
Before I can think up a response, he steers me toward the bath. “Come on.”
With his hand in mine, he helps me into the steaming water. Despite him saying he would look for clothes, he sinks beside the bath with a pleased smile curving
his lips. “You look relaxed.”
I smile back. “The water feels nice.”
“Good. You want me to wash your back for you?”
“My dad loved my mom. I think they still would’ve chosen each other even if they weren’t fated mates.” The words slip out before I knew I was going to say
them. But I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t take them back if I could.
I hadn’t intended to talk about Mom and Dad ever again, but Shay has always made it hard to stay silent. Maybe it’s because he’s my mate that I want to
share things with him. But maybe it’s just because it’s Shay.
“They would?” Shay asks gently.
After lowering my head to take in the bubbles that cover most of my lower body, I nod. “He was alpha, but even when he was busy, he always made time for
her… and me.”
“Sound like a good guy.”
 My eyes fill with tears. “He was.”
A tear slides down my cheek and splashes in the water. Not a second later, Shay is rising from his crouch and stepping into the bath behind me.
I lift my head and brush away my tears as he settles with his legs on either side of mine. “Shay? I thought you said—”
“Yes,” he interrupts, as he wraps his arms around me and draws my body back against his chest. “And I meant it. But the tears changed everything.” He kisses
my hair. “I feel your pain, pup, and I have to do something about it.”
“You’re already doing something,” I admit. “You’re here.”
“Words like that will get you everything you want,” Shay says with a smile in his voice.
“You already give me everything I want.”
“Do I?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Then it means I’m a good mate.”
“No,” I tell him in a quiet voice as I take in the treehouse's beauty. “It means you’re the best.”
 11

“D o you think it’s over now?” I ask when Shay bends to take my empty bowl from me.
Although we’re on the second day of stew, I’m still not tired of it yet, and I don’t think I ever will. Not when Shay is such a good cook.
“I don’t know, pup.”
“But Daniel said it would take a day.”
Shay picks up his empty bowl from the small wooden dining table we ate our meal before crossing over to the sink. I wrap my arms around my knees as I
watch him rinse them out. I’d offer to help, but I know better than to even ask. Shay wouldn’t let me. “He said, maybe. Fights sometimes don’t go the way you
expect. People can surprise you.”
His words fill me with a tension that I haven’t felt since before our shared bath earlier that morning. All day we’ve dozed in front of the fire, sometimes napping,
sometimes talking, or Shay has just held me.
“So things could go badly?”
He glances at me as if he can feel my rising anxiety. “Things might go badly for a little while, but they won’t stay that way. I have experienced fighters who
know what they’re doing and who can recover from surprises quickly.”
But the thought doesn’t ease my mind. I lower my gaze to my knees. The faded blue shirt Shay found for me smelled a little musty, but it drowns me
completely. I have no idea who it belongs to, but it isn’t Ewan.
“I think you should go back. They might need you.”
“And what will you be doing while I run back?” Shay asks in an expressionless voice.
I shrug, still keeping my gaze on my t-shirt-covered knees. “I could stay here.”
“And would you?”
No.
But because Shay would know that I was lying if I said anything else, I say nothing at all.
The silence stretches on and on and I have no idea what to say to fill it.
When Shay crosses over to me and sinks beside my chair, he doesn’t need to say a word. I lift my head and meet his eyes. “It would stop all the fighting.”
I’d expected anger, or… something. Just not the calmness I read on his face.
“There were some lessons I didn’t want to tell you that my father made me learn,” he says. “Maybe it was a mistake that I didn’t.”
I search his eyes and I shake my head. “You don’t need to tell me. I think I know what you’re hinting at.”
Now the anger he must’ve been hiding creeps into his eyes. “And what is that?”
“That even if I go to them, it might not be enough to stop the fighting.”
His hand snakes around my nape, under my hair, and he gently shakes me. “Then why,” he bites out, “would you still want to do it?”
“Because when you mess up, you make things right. No matter what.” I swallow back my tears. “That’s what my dad taught me.”
“And how have you messed up?”
“I came to your pack.”
“You didn’t come here, Lexa. I brought you here.”
“But I stayed when I knew what would happen.”
“Lexa—”
I peel his hand away and jump to my feet. “No. Maybe you weren’t supposed to find me. Maybe—” something in Shay’s gaze makes the words stop in my
throat.
His eyes burn as he rises. The intensity in his gaze makes me back up.
“Maybe what?” Shay breathes as he prowls toward me.
He doesn’t stop until my back hits the wall and his hand is once again wrapped around the nape of my throat.
I lower my gaze to his chest. “Maybe I was supposed to die with my pack.”
The silence that follows my whisper is so thick with tension that I can’t breathe. I don’t lift my head. All I do is watch Shay’s chest rise and fall.
“And is that what you wanted?” he asks, an eternity later.
I don’t respond.
“Lexa?” Shay growls.
My eyes fly to his because he never growls. Not at me.
When I glimpse the depth of emotion in his eyes, the pain, the anger… and the need, I lose the ability to think, much less talk.
“Lexa, tell me,” he orders with a thread of desperation in his voice.
Tears fill my eyes, and I shake my head. “No,” I whisper. “It isn’t what I want.”
A little of the pain and hurt melts away. “Why not?”
I swallow more tears that threaten to choke me. “Because of you. I should leave, but I don’t want to because of you. I need you.”
“Just need?”
I shake my head. “No. Even in my dreams, I want you.”
“Baby,” he murmurs, as he lowers his head. “Baby.”
His lips touch mine and the moment they do, I grab onto his shoulders and use them to force myself closer. To make him deepen the kiss.
He kisses me until I feel like I’m drowning, and it still isn’t enough. I press closer, my hands stroking up over his back.
With a muffled curse, Shay tears himself away, his breathing as ragged as mine, his eyes dark with need. “We have to stop. You’re not ready for this, baby.”
Despite his desire, his gaze begs me to stop him.
“I want you,” I tell him.
 He frames my face with hands that shake. “Lexa…”
My fingers explore his muscled chest. There’s no part of him that I don’t want. That I don’t need.
“I didn’t tell you about all of my dreams,” I murmur as I stroke his skin.
Shay swallows hard enough for me to hear. “What dreams, baby?”
I squeeze my eyes shut briefly because this isn’t easy to tell him, but I force myself to be brave. All Shay has done is give, and not once has he asked for or
expected anything in return.
“Sometimes it isn’t you touching me,” I whisper.
His heart spikes under my fingers. “Tell me,” he breathes.
My hands continue their journey down his chest, over his stomach, and lower. He sucks in a sharp breath. “Sometimes it’s me.”
The first brush of my fingers against him makes him jump. My eyes fly to his face. “I hurt you.”
With his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he shakes his head. “You didn’t hurt me, Lexa.”
Relieved that I haven't already done something wrong, I return my attention and my fingers to the hard length of him.
He’s pressed against me often enough that I should know what he would feel like in my hands. When I close my hand around him, Shay drags in another
breath. “You feel so smooth and warm.” I give him an experimental stroke up and down and he gasps.
I dart a glance at his face. “Are you sure I’m not—”
“You’re not hurting me,” he interrupts. “It feels good.”
I stroke him again, more firmly this time, and as I watch, a colorless liquid emerges from the tip. Seeing it awakens a craving in me. “Shay?”
“Baby?” His voice is a husky growl.
I go to my knees. But before I can sink all the way, Shay’s hands tighten around my face. “Lexa? What are you doing?”
If I thought his eyes were needy before, it’s nothing compared to them now.
“I want to taste.”
Tremors shake his body, and sweat breaks out on his brow. “Baby,” he shakes his head. No, he just plain shakes. “You don’t have to do this, I shouldn’t—”
“I want to. I…” Heat spills over my cheeks but I force myself to keep meeting his eyes. “I would dream about it,” I whisper.
His face goes still, but his breathing turns ragged. “You dreamt of this?”
Nodding, I wait for a response, but when it doesn’t come, I drop to my knees. This time, he doesn’t stop me. Instead, he shifts his hands from my face to my
hair.
He’s so big that I struggle to believe he’ll fit inside me. But the size of him doesn’t stop me from leaning forward to lap at the clear liquid.
Shay jumps and his hands tighten in my hair.
I cast an anxious glance up.
He shakes his head. “Didn’t hurt.”
So I return my focus to him. I lick him again. He tastes faintly salty, but not unpleasant. Wanting more, I draw the tip of him in my mouth and suck.
His hands bunch tightly in my hair. “Lexa… baby, your mouth,” he groans.
I take a little more of him in my mouth and suck harder. When he gently thrusts against my tongue, I know he likes it.
“God, I’m not going to last.”
The need in Shay’s voice makes me braver. I open my mouth wider as his hands comb desperately through my hair.
“I should stop you,” he gasps.
But he doesn’t stop me. He drags me closer.
His increasing groans and the desperate grip he has on my hair makes me want to give him more pleasure, so I suck him deeper and deeper into my throat.
“Fuck,” he swears, his hands spasming in my hair before he wrenches me away.
In the next moment, he has me in his arms as he stalks toward the bed.
“You swore,” I murmur. Not bothered by it, but surprised. “You never swear around me.”
He lays me down on the bed and strokes my hair back from my face. “If you had any idea how good that was, you would understand that you just about fried
my brain.”
“Really?”
His lips descend, pausing an inch from mine. “Really. And the sight of you, on your knees like that. I’m going to be dreaming about that for the next hundred
years.”
I slide my arms around his shoulders as Shay kisses me with the same hunger I read in his eyes moments before. When the tip of his tongue strokes the seam of
my lips, I part them and he slips inside.
Moaning into his mouth, I dig my nails into his shoulders as he angles his head and deepens his kiss.
He sweeps me away to a place where there is only pleasure.
When his fingers brush against my right breast in a touch so light, I don’t know why I gasp in surprise, but I do.
He lifts his head, breaking the kiss.
As we study each other, working to steady our ragged breaths, his hand brushes me again, his touch as soft as before. As if he’s testing my response.
I arch my body up, pressing my breast more firmly into his hand.
Satisfaction fills his eyes as he gently squeezes me through my t-shirt. “Is that good, baby?”
I nod.
His eyes search my face. I wait for him to touch me again, or kiss me, but he keeps his focus on my face. “This is new for you, isn’t it? All of it?”
Everything in me stills because I know what he’s asking me.
For several seconds I don’t speak, but I feel him waiting for my response. So I nod again.
“I thought so. And no one has—”
“No,” I interrupt, my eyes locked to his because I need him to read the truth of my answer. “I never wanted…” my voice trails off because saying this without
looking away is hard. “I never wanted anyone the way I want you.”
When he takes his hand away from my breast, I think I’ve said something wrong. But he frames my face with both hands, and the intensity in his eyes is like
nothing I’ve ever seen before. “You keep finding new ways to burrow deeper into my heart. You know that?”
“I don’t mean to.”
He presses a kiss against my brow. “I know,” he breathes, “it’s just you.”
After a moment, he lifts his head and peers deep into my eyes. “We’ll go slow, okay, love?”
I slide my hands around his hips. “What if I don’t want to go slow?” I ask, just to see what he will say.
He stares at me.
“Shay?”
 “You’re trying to kill me,” he sighs. “It’s the only thing I can think of.”
For a second I think he’s being serious, but then his lips twitch and I smile. “Then we’ll go slow,” I tell him soberly. “Because I would rather we both survived
this.”
His smile widens. “If you want to stop, tell me and we’ll stop.”
Against my lower belly, he throbs. “But won’t that be uncomfortable for you?”
“The issue, love, isn’t my comfort. It’s yours.”
“I don’t think I’ll want to stop.”
“Because of your dreams?”
“No. Because when you touch me, I never want you to stop,” I murmur as I stretch up to kiss him.
He meets me halfway, kissing me softly before he urges me back to the bed.
Moments later, his hand whispers over the curve of one breast and angles down. His fingers stroke along the skin just below the hem of my shirt, and when I
urge his body closer, his hand slips under my shirt and skims up my inner thigh. I part my legs wider and he groans in my mouth when I do.
Just before his fingers brush against my core, he breaks the kiss and stares deep into my eyes.
It’s exactly like the dream down to the moonlight spilling around us, his bare chest, and the dark hunger in his eyes. The only difference between reality and my
dream is my shirt, but that’s an easy fix, so I sit up.
“Lexa?” Shay’s brow creases in concern and he pulls his hand away, only stopping when I grip the bottom of my shirt and ease the material over my head.
The material blinds me, so I don’t see his initial reaction, but when I lay back down, his gaze awakens a slow burn in my belly. His eyes sweep over me,
growing hotter as they caress my body, lingering at my breasts and the junction of my parted thighs.
“I’m not going to survive this,” he murmurs. “I don’t deserve this.” Now he lifts his head and meets my eyes. “I don’t deserve you.”
How can someone want me this much? How can this be real?
I gaze up at him in disbelief that Shay, the most beautiful man in the world, would feel this way about me. His finger brushes against the part of me I’ve dreamt
he would touch and kiss. Except now, it’s real.
A single stroke and it’s enough to make me gasp. “Shay.”
He closes one hand around my hip as if to hold me still, and his fingers return.
It’s nothing like my dreams.
I cry out; I writhe under his tender assault as I fight back the pleasure tightening my belly, desperate for him to never stop.
He dips the thick tip of his finger inside me and I moan, a long, needy sound that he echoes with a deep groan of his own. “You’re so responsive, baby,” he
murmurs, his breathing as unsteady as mine. His finger slips in deeper and I gasp.
I’m splayed out in front of him, completely open to his gaze. Exposed.
My skin should burn hot with how I must look, but all I do is burn for Shay.
His thumb brushes against the bundle of nerves that makes me gasp and grab for his wrist to hold him there. “Shay, please,” I pant.
I’m grinding myself against his hand, and I can’t make myself stop. It feels too good.
His lips find mine in a desperate kiss, and there’s a new hunger as his tongue plunges into my mouth. He strokes me harder and despite his body pressing me
into the bed, my hips rise as I fight him. I’m gasping into his mouth, my body so tense that it’s a wonder I can move at all. I’m so close to the pleasure I could never
reach in my dreams.
But it’s there.
Right there.
His finger brushes against that bundle of nerves again, harder than before, and I rip my face from his. My scream echoes all around us as I thrash under him.
Nothing exists anymore but this rich wave of pleasure battering all sense, all thought from my mind.
It takes a long time before I can breathe again, much less think.
Slowly, the tension in my body eases and my muscles relax.
I slide my hands over his back, and then I open my eyes, already knowing what I will find: Shay braced on his forearms over me.
For a moment, all I can do is stare at him in shock. “I think you killed me.”
He barks out a laugh before bending to press a hard kiss on my lips. “Not yet, love.”
And then I feel what’s probing me between my legs. My insides ripple with awareness because I know what he means.
I remember the size of him in my hands, and I swallow hard at the thought of him sliding all that hardness into my body.
“It will only hurt once, and then never again,” he murmurs.
“I know. But you’re so—”
He kisses me gently. “I will fit. You were made for me,” he murmurs as his eyes search my face, “just as I was made for you.”
Yes.
I believe it.
My anxiety eases at his words, and reading it in my eyes, Shay smiles. “Now, love?”
Nodding, I grip his hips. “Now.”
He tucks himself tight against me but doesn’t slip inside. Despite knowing this is what I want, that Shay will make me feel good, I tense as I brace myself for
him to move.
Lowering his head, his lips find mine in an achingly sweet kiss.
I forget my anxiety. I forget everything but how perfect this kiss is. How perfect Shay is.
My body relaxes into the bed and I sigh in contented pleasure.
Shay eases his body from mine as his kiss continues. He surges forward and I break away with a shocked gasp of pain.
He lies still over me, his eyes locked on mine. “It’s okay, baby. That was it. No more pain now. It will only feel good.”
The burn between my legs doesn’t promise pleasure, but I know Shay wouldn’t lie to me.
I hold still, not wanting to make the pain worse.
After a moment, he lowers his head again, and his lips touch mine. He distracts me from the lingering pain with another kiss, a deeper, richer one with tangling
tongues and open mouths. As I lose myself in the kiss, the pain fades and a slow pulsing need takes its place.
He withdraws a couple of inches, and I gasp, but this time, it isn’t because I’m in pain.
When he plunges back into me, I don’t gasp; I moan.
My nails cling to his back because I didn’t think anything would feel as good as the heights he just lifted me before, but now I know how wrong I was. This will
be unlike anything I could have ever imagined.
I can feel it in my bones.
His lips remain locked to mine as he drives himself inside me, burrowing deeper and deeper each time. Clamping my legs around him, I lift my hips to meet
each of his thrusts.
He moves faster, his kiss hungrier as the heavy scent of sex and sweat wraps around us. The wind blows through the treehouse, cooling our overheated bodies.
His muscles tense beneath my fingers, and deep in my body, he throbs.
He must be close. Maybe as close as I am.
I couldn’t believe he would fit inside me, but he fills every inch of me so perfectly that it’s just another sign the universe made him for me. No one else could
ever complete me the way Shay does.
My breathing changes. When it does, Shay breaks the kiss and lifts his head.
“Now, baby,” he breathes, his face harsh with his own need. “Now.”
He edges out and plunges deep inside.
I stare, wide-eyed, my mouth falling open as a whirlwind of pleasure rips through me. And then I shatter.
His body strains deep inside me, but I barely feel it as I scream and writhe against him. Wanting more, but knowing I can’t take anymore. That it would kill me.
It goes on and on.
He holds me against him, his fingers gripping my hips as he jerks against me, filling me with heat. I fight for breath as I shudder beneath him, almost mindless
with pleasure.
“It’s okay, baby,” he groans as his lips press against my brow, his hips still working against mine. “We’ll ride it together.”
And we do.
Long minutes later, I remember there’s a world outside, even if I have no desire to pull away from Shay or to leave the treehouse again.
When Shay rolls me to my side and pulls me tight against him, I press my face against the hollow of his throat and cling to him. His hand strokes up and down
my back, as he rains soft kisses on my brow and my hair, lulling me into relaxation.
Between one breath and the next, the world fades.
 12

F ingers skim my back. It feels so good that a smile stretches across my face and I sigh in pleasure.
“Good?” Shay murmurs.
I peel my eyes open and take in Shay lying on his back beside me. “Good.”
He’s wearing a smile as well. A wider one than I’ve ever seen on his face before. And it’s not just that, there’s a deep well of happiness I can practically feel
shining out of his eyes.
He glows with it.
I thought he was beautiful. But like this? He’s like no one else I’ve ever seen before.
“You look happy,” I murmur, unable to believe this man is mine.
His eyebrows rise in disbelief. “I’ve just made love with the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman who is my mate. I’m the happiest man in the world.”
A flush heats my skin. Not just on my cheeks and face, I feel it sweep all over me.
Shay’s gaze explores my body. “You blush over every inch of that beautiful ivory skin,” he murmurs.
Of course, that only makes me blush harder, and his smile kicks up into a grin.
It’s still dark out and probably late enough that we should still be sleeping, and we probably will soon. But I’m not ready to let go of tonight yet.
My eyes move over Shay’s body as he lies on his side, his head braced on his bent elbow. When I reach a hand out toward him, he takes his hand from my
back and grips it.
Our fingers lace. Although his hand is so much larger than mine, we fit together perfectly.
“Perfect fit,” he murmurs, echoing my thoughts.
I smile with my eyes still on our joined hands.
“Lexa?”
“Hmm?”
“We didn’t talk about what might happen after.”
I lift my head to his. “After?”
He darts a glance down. “After.”
When I look down, I realize where he’s focused his attention. My flat stomach.
I’m smiling when I lift my head. “You mean a baby?”
A new light fills his eyes. “Yes, a baby.”
“What is there to talk about?”
“So, you like the idea of that?”
Already I can picture a little boy with Shay’s turquoise eyes and white-blond hair. “I’d like a boy like you.”
He snorts. “No, you don’t. I was a troublemaker who never sat still for a second. It has to be a girl like you.”
Terror stabs me in the heart.
A girl like me.
Suddenly I’m breathing too fast, and a sheen of sweat forms on my brow. I tear my hand from Shay’s and scramble for the edge of the bed.
“Lexa, what? What is it?”
I don’t make it off the bed. Moving fast, Shay tugs at my hand so I fall to my back. He braces his weight over me so I can’t get away again, his face creased
with concern.
The air is rich with the scent of terror.
Mine.
“Lexa. Breathe.”
I can’t breathe. Air pants out of me with each hard gasp.
“Breathe, baby. Breathe.”
His words penetrate the thick fog of my fear enough that I drag in a deep breath.
“Good,” he murmurs. “And again.”
I drag in yet another delicious mouthful of air until I feel my lungs begin to work the way they should.
The next several minutes pass this way. Shay tells me to breathe, and I breathe, long past the point he could stop.
When my breathing is steady, he lowers his head so his brow is touching mine. “Now, what panicked you?”
His body pins me to the bed, and his hands grip my face. He’s too heavy to move, and there’s no way I can break his stare. With nowhere to escape, I close
my eyes.
He’s silent for a beat. “Lexa?”
I don’t respond. I’ve gotten used to using silence to keep the world out, and I do that now.
“I know you’re afraid, and that’s okay. But I’m your mate. The other half of your soul. You never need to hide from me. I would never hurt you.”
“I know you won’t hurt me,” I whisper with my eyes still closed.
“Then let me in. What scared you?”
I shake my head, because this touches too close to the reason my pack is dead.
No. The reason it’s your fault.
“You’re my heart, baby,” he murmurs. “Let me in.”
My eyes open, because he’s my heart as well.
The corners of his eyes crease in a smile. “Good. How about we start small?”
 “There’s no small place to start,” I sigh. “It’s all big.”
“Baby, it feels that way because you’re carrying it all on your shoulders. There’s only so much a person can take.”
“Even you?”
His expression is sober. “Even me.”
As much as I want to argue, I can’t, because he’s right. I’ve carried so much in my head and my heart for so long that I always feel like I’m drowning. “I
wasn’t born human,” I whisper. “I was a wolf first.”
Tensing, I wait for his response, because only men are born with the ability to shift, but they are always human first, and wolves when they have their first shift
at twelve.
“You shift as fast as an alpha.”
When he doesn’t recoil in horror, I relax a touch. “Yes.”
“And that’s why?”
I nod.
His eyes search my face. “And it’s why those men want you.”
“I…” I struggle with the need to hide.
As if Shay senses my battle, he kisses my brow. “It’s just me. It’s just your mate.”
After a second, I release my breath. “Because I was born a wolf first, and I shifted to human hours later, my parents said it made me different. That I should
always keep it a secret. That I should never tell.”
I didn’t listen.
“Different how?” Shay asks.
“I shift fast, and I…” I search his expression, because the only other person I told proved to be the biggest mistake I made in my life. “Any daughter I have will
be like me. She will be born a shifter.”
Although he doesn’t respond, I see the realization spark in his eyes.
Most women don’t survive a bite from a wolf shifter. It’s why there are more human women in a pack than there are female shifters. What I am is so rare that if
anyone knew, they would cage me. My parents knew that, so they did everything they could to protect me.
“Like your mother?” Shay asks.
After a pause, I nod.
“And that’s why you stopped talking.”
I nod again. “So now you know why it’s not safe for your pack if I stay.” I talk to his chin, because I can’t look him in the eye when I tell him this. “They won’t
ever stop looking for me because of what I am.”
“They will stop,” Shay murmurs, the confidence in his voice making me raise my head. “Because they’ll be dead. All of them.”
He means it.
I peer into his eyes, and I see that he means to kill every last one of them.
“Shay…”
Before I can speak, he lowers his head and kisses me lightly on the lips. “This is what you meant when you said you killed your pack? You blame yourself for
what these men did?”
Only his hands stop me from turning my face away. “It was my fault.”
A crease breaks his smooth brow. “How?”
But I don’t say.
He’s made his mind up that I’m not to blame, and I know I am. Nothing he can say will ever change that.
His frown deepens. “Lexa, it wasn’t your fault.”
“You treat me like I’m perfect. Like I do nothing wrong, but that’s not true.”
Despite my words, one corner of his lips turns up in a half-smile. “You say that like it’s a flaw. Like I’m the one doing something wrong.”
“You are.”
“I’m not. You want to know how I can be so sure?”
“How?”
He leans closer. “Because I’m alpha, and alphas are always right.”
“No, they’re not.”
“They are.”
“They’re…” It hits me what he’s doing. “You’re trying to distract me.”
His expression is far too innocent. All wide-eyed charm. “Am I?”
I tell myself to stay firm, to not give in, but my lips twitch. “Yes. You are.”
He darts a glance at the smile that I’m trying, and mostly failing to hide. “And I can tell that it’s working.”
“No, it’s not.” The urge to smile grows. Now I’m biting my lip to hide my need.
“It isn’t?” he murmurs, as he strokes one hand down the side of my face and across my shoulder. “Then maybe it’s time I brought out the big guns.”
“What are the—” A laugh blows out of me when his fingers find the part of my side that I’m most ticklish.
In seconds, he reduces me to tears as I fight off his attack, all the while laughing so hard that I must be scaring away all the birds in a fifty-mile radius.
When I’ve laughed so much that my insides hurt, Shay finally stops and I brush the tears from my cheeks.
He gazes down at me with a smile tugging his lips, his eyes sober. “To those men, you’re valuable because of what you can give them.” His fingers brush a tear
I missed from my cheek. “But to me, you are my heart. You give me a peace I’ve never known, even before my father dragged me out of the kitchen and told me I
would spend the rest of my life alone and burdened with more responsibility than I ever wanted. Your value is you. All of you. Never forget that.”
Everything in me softens. I feel it happen.
“I think I must be the luckiest girl in the world,” I murmur. “To have you.”
“Does this mean there won’t be any more escape attempts?”
I shake my head. “No. My place is with you.”
“You promise?”
In his eyes, I read his fear that he’ll lose me, so I stroke my hands up his back and bury them in his soft blond hair. “I promise.” And then I press on his scalp
so he knows what I want.
He lowers his head, and his lips find mine. As a fresh wind blows through the cabin, he slips back inside me.
 13

S hay’s gaze caresses the side of my face. It’s the only way to explain how it feels when he looks at me.
I don’t even need to turn my head in his direction to know he’s doing it.
“I think this is fast becoming my favorite thing to do in the world,” he murmurs.
“Watching me bathe?” I ask, lifting my head from the cloth I’m swiping over my thigh and to the bed, where Shay returned after he’d filled the tub for me.
I know what he means. Since we’ve been here, Shay hasn’t dressed, so seeing him sprawled out naked on the bed with his eyes full of heat is the reason I’ve
spent most of my bath focused on my washcloth.
Watching him is fast becoming my favorite thing to do, too.
“Hmm.” His gaze lowers to my breasts. “I think I prefer to do something else more.”
After we spent most of the night in bed making love, and then again this morning, only rising when the sun was high in the sky, I can guess what that might be.
“You’re insatiable,” I murmur.
“What I am is hungry,” he says as he rises from the bed.
My gaze dips to take in his body, and as always, my mouth goes dry. I will never tire of touching him, or of him touching me.
“And so are you,” Shay continues as he stalks toward me. “I can feel it.”
His words draw my eyes back to his face. “Yes.”
After grabbing the towel that he left for me at the end of the bed, he halts a few steps away. “Come here.”
The old Lexa wouldn’t have wanted to expose herself in front of someone like that, but this Lexa is with her mate, a man she knows wants her as much as she
wants him. So I rise from the bath and turn to face him.
Shay doesn’t move. He doesn’t take his eyes from my body, and I’m sure he doesn’t even breathe.
He just stares.
“Shay?”
I get no response, so I take a step out of the bath.
Before my foot can touch the floor, he’s there, wrapping the towel around my back as he draws me against his body.
“I’m getting you wet,” I murmur as my breasts press against his bare chest.
He slides a hand around my jaw and touches his brow to mine. “You’re making me want to stay here with you forever.”
I blink. “What?”
His eyes search my face. “I don’t know how I’m going to go back to just being alpha.”
As I study him, I recall his story about wanting nothing more than to stay in the kitchen as a boy. “Is that what you want? To stay here and let someone else be
alpha?”
Shay’s sigh is full of frustration. “No. Yes.” He shakes his head. “Being alpha is who I am. I don’t think it’s something I can turn away from.”
I slide my arms around his shoulders. “But it’s not all you are. And I’ll help.”
A new emotion flashes in his eyes. “You’ll help?”
I nod. “You don’t need to do everything on your own anymore. You have me.”
“I do, don’t I?” he says, his fingers stroking my cheek.
“You do.” A thought occurs. “But don’t expect me to fight alpha challenges. I think you’ll do a better job than me with that.”
His lip twitches. “And there is a little more of that sense of humor spilling out,” he says, as he swings me into his arms and heads for the bed.
As he lays me down, my thoughts return to the courtyard and what might be happening there now. Shay has never lost his confidence that the pack is okay
without him, but I can’t help but worry, even knowing how capable Ewan is.
Maybe if they weren’t mostly strangers to me, I’d be a little less anxious. But I know Aron, and I would never forgive myself if the same thing happened here.
“Your mind is drifting,” Shay murmurs.
I blink and refocus on his face above mine. “A little.”
“And I think I can guess where it’s drifted too.”
He probably could. “Will we go back today?”
“If Ewan doesn’t send someone with news by this afternoon, I’ll head back and see what’s happening. But I have faith in my people.”
“And where will I be?”
“You,” Shay murmurs, as he covers my body with his, and his voice turns husky, “will be sleeping in his bed, safe, warm, comfortable and worn out from all the
things I plan to do to you.”
I stroke my hands over his back. “And what things are those?”
“I could show you,” he murmurs, giving me one more kiss before moving down my body.
Before he can, I grip his face and stop him.
His eyes crease in concern. “Lexa? You don’t want me to?”
I love you.
My lips part, but I don’t say the words out loud. I’ve gotten so used to holding in all the things I should let out that it always seems so difficult to speak.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel what this ache is in my heart. It’s more than just need or want. It’s love.
Shay moves back up my body, not saying a word, never taking his eyes off me. And he knows. There’s a sweet heat in his eyes that tells me he heard my voice
as if I spoke them aloud. The way he always has.
“I know you think the pack will be okay without you, but it can’t be easy being with me instead of them,” I whisper.
“And is that the reason why?”
I shake my head. “It’s one of them, but it’s not the only reason.”
 “What reasons are those?” he murmurs.
“There are too many reasons for me to love you,” I tell him.
“I know the feeling, pup.” He lowers his head and kisses me again on the lips, a tender joining that makes me want it to last forever.
His hands frame my face, and when I think the kiss can’t get any sweeter, he angles his head and deepens it. Moaning into his mouth, I wind my legs around
the back of his.
One hand leaves the side of my face and closes around my hips. He’s easing back, ready to slip back inside me, when he breaks the kiss and jerks his head to
the door.
“Shay?”
In the next moment, he’s off me, his face more serious than I’ve ever seen it. “Get dressed, Lexa. And stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I sit up. “But why? What’s—” And then I smell it.
Blood.
Shay takes advantage of my silence to cross the room and slip outside, closing the door behind him.
Everything in me wants to follow so I can make sure that he’s not walking into trouble. But Shay wouldn’t have run out like that if it wasn’t something he could
handle, so I get up and try to prepare myself for when he returns.
I’ve just slipped the oversize t-shirt over my head when the door bursts open and Shay stalks in. He has the body of a light brown wolf draped over his
shoulder, and from the blood dripping on the floor and matting the wolf’s fur, he’s hurt. Badly.
It’s the same wolf from before. Daniel. For him to be this hurt means something has gone very wrong in the courtyard.
Shay’s face is like stone as he lays Daniel on the bed. Moments later, the wolf’s fur ripples, and what was once a bloody wolf is an even bloodier man.
My hand flies to my mouth when I take in the horror of his injuries. Every inch of him is covered in bites and claw marks. The worst is a ragged tear across his
stomach. He looks like he’s been savaged by a pack of wolves.
This is my fault.
“Daniel,” Shay murmurs. “Let me get a—”
Daniel’s hand snaps out and locks around Shay’s wrist, halting him before he can head to the kitchen for a cloth or bandage. “Wait. I have to tell you
something.”
After a pause, Shay nods, his face harder now than before as he sinks beside Daniel.
“You’re probably thinking I’ve looked better,” Daniel chokes, his face twisted in pain.
“And I’d be right.” There’s no amusement in Shay’s voice. “What happened?”
More blood slides down his belly and soaks into the bed. Daniel’s eyes tighten with fresh pain, but he doesn’t make a sound.
I turn and walk away.
Although I feel Shay’s gaze on my back, he doesn’t call out to me or stop me. After rifling through a few cupboards, I find a small stack of clean rags in one
beside the sink and grab them all before returning to the bed.
I perch on the other end of the bed and press a cloth against Daniel’s belly to stem the worst of the bleeding, wincing when Daniel does. “Sorry.”
“No need to go to the trouble, Luna,” Daniel murmurs.
“It’s the least I can do,” I tell him.
Shay’s hand touches the ends of my hair, but I ignore it. “Can I get you some water?”
Daniel shakes his head. “No need.” He turns back to Shay. “Don’t take her back there. Not yet.”
“The fight is going badly.” Shay’s words echo my thoughts.
“We’re winning.”
“But?” Shay probes.
“It’s taking longer than we thought. None of us expected them to be so determined. And they are determined. Ewan guessed you’d come back to the
courtyard either today or tomorrow, and walk straight into an ambush, so I volunteered to—”
“Walk through the ambush yourself?” Shay interrupts.
Daniel snorts. A second later, he gasps in pain.
Hot blood soaks through the first cloth and onto my hand. I grab another and press down, but I know it won’t stop the bleeding.
I turn to Shay. “Do you have a needle and thread here?”
He gazes back at me without expression. “You want to sew the wound closed?”
“It’s the only way to stop the bleeding.”
As shifters, we heal faster than normal humans do—but if I can’t stop the bleeding, he will bleed out before his body has a chance to heal. And I have a feeling
he’s lost too much blood already.
After a moment, Shay nods. “It’s in the—”
Daniel grips my wrist with an icy hand. “No need,” he interrupts.
When I turn back to him, it’s like he’s aged ten years. His skin now is almost bone-white, and the once healthy man in his twenties that I remember from the
cabin is gone.
“It’s not just your stomach, is it?” I ask in a low voice.
“No. I don’t know why those men want you, but they want you too bad for it to be for anything good. I’m guessing that’s part of the reason you didn’t want to
speak.”
“Yes.” I pause. When I think about what Daniel has done for me and Shay, I realize he deserves more of an answer than that. “I was born a shifter. Any girl I
have will be the same as me and… well. You can probably guess why they’d want me.”
Aron would have already sold my first five children. It’s the only reason I can think he’d have convinced so many men to fight for him. I’d probably spend the
rest of my life giving him more little girls he can sell until it killed me.
Daniel’s pain-filled eyes flash with determination before he shifts his gaze to Shay. “You can’t let them have her.”
Shay closes his hand around Daniel’s shoulder. “I don’t intend on it.”
“Good,” Daniel breathes, seeming to deflate. “If you have to go back, wait a couple more…” His words are so breathy, it’s as if he isn’t drawing enough air
into his lungs. “…Days.”
My hands are slick with blood. As my eyes fill with tears, I grab another rag and press it against his belly.
“Thank you,” Shay murmurs. “For what you did.”
Daniel’s eyes settle on a point just over my shoulder, and the pain melts away from his face. I wait for another breath to pass his lips, but as the seconds tick
by, it doesn’t happen.
A tear slides down my cheek and splashes onto my hand.
“Lexa?”
I lean toward Daniel and kiss his cheek. It’s even colder than his hand was. “Thank you, Daniel.”
When I get to my feet, Shay is there, his hands gripping the top of my arms. “This wasn’t your fault, Lexa.”
“I need to get a cloth and water. I’d like to clean the blood off him before we bury him.”
“Lexa?”
My gaze doesn’t move from his chest. When I don’t respond, Shay kisses my forehead before he releases me.
The moment he does, I slip past him and head for the kitchen for a bowl of water, so I can set to work cleaning the body of the man who gave his life for me.
Another life lost.
Because of me.
 14

“I know you wanted to come with me, but I think it’s safer if you stay here.”
Shay’s voice still echoes in my head as I sit on the edge of the bed, staring down at the blood-soaked sheets. He left more than an hour ago, but I
can still see Daniel’s body.
I could clean the blood from him, but that was all I could do.
There was nothing I could do to bring him back.
Another tear slides down my face and drips onto the sheets.
Shay will be back soon. Not that I know how long it takes to bury a body, because I’m always the one causing the deaths while someone else deals with the
burying part.
If I knew Shay wouldn’t immediately come after me, I’d leave. Now.
But he’d know where I went, and he’d get to me before I reached the men who did this to Daniel. And I would put him in danger.
So instead of doing the one thing I know I should, I brush my tears away with the back of my hand and strip the sheets from the bed.
Shay finds me scrubbing at the blood staining the mattress minutes later. I don’t know if it will ever come out, but that doesn’t stop me from scrubbing all the
harder.
“Lexa?”
I lift my head to find Shay standing beside the bed.
His hands and body are covered with dirt, and there’s a bone-deep exhaustion on his face that I know isn’t because of his physical task. He holds his hands
out to me. “Come here, pup.”
And that’s when I hear it. The pain. The knowledge that one of his pack is dead and there’s nothing he can do to bring them back.
I drop my cloth and go to him, not stopping until I’ve pressed my face against his chest and wound my arms around his hips. Shay holds me tight with his hand
on the back of my hair and the other on my lower back.
We stand that way for a long time, neither of us saying a word.
Minutes later, Shay kisses my hair before releasing me. “Give me a minute to get cleaned up, and I’ll make you some food.”
I’m already shaking my head before he’s finished speaking. “I’m not hungry.”
His fingers grip my chin and tilt my head up so we’re eye to eye. “You need to eat, pup.”
I consider arguing. But one look in his eyes and I know his need to feed me is less about us having not eaten in hours, and more about his need to do
something for me, so I sigh. “Okay, but only if you let me help.”
Because I need to do something for him too.
When a faint smile touches his lips, I know he’s read me as easily as he always has. “Okay, pup. I’ll get cleaned up. How about you rummage around in the
cupboards and see what other ingredients are lurking in there you want to eat?”
There’s nothing I want to eat. But I smile and head toward the kitchen, because it’s something to focus on, and it means for a moment at least, I can forget
about the bloodstained sheets—and Daniel.

Neither of us eats much of the stew.

Throughout our meal, Shay keeps his hand on my lower back as we sit at the bench-style dining table beside the kitchen.
By now, darkness is falling.
More and more, I find the windows drawing my gaze as I think about the courtyard, and how many more are dead or dying.
“How about a story, pup?”
I glance at Shay. Seeing him dressed for the first time since we came to the treehouse in a gray t-shirt and sweatpants makes me realize just how much has
changed.
It’s crazy to think this morning we napped, laughed in bed, and made love.
Now a man is dead, the bed is stained with blood, and neither of us can finish a half-serving of stew because our thoughts lie miles away from here.
“What kind of story?” I ask.
“About how Daniel made me fall into a pot of soup.” He says it so straight-faced that the full impact of his words doesn’t hit me until a couple of seconds later.
“What?”
Smiling at me, he returns his spoon to the bowl. “You heard right. I nearly wound up as an ingredient in dinner one night.”
“You knew him in the kitchen?”
He nods. “Back in that life when I wasn’t alpha and had no desire to be, we were friends.”
After putting my spoon down, I rise. Shay gazes at me questioningly, until I move to sit side-ways in his lap and curve my arm around his shoulders.
“So, he saved you from becoming dinner. But how did that happen?”
Shay draws me even closer with his arm around my waist. “Daniel had a similar upbringing to me. A strict father who liked to push, and a neglected mom. She
was still alive, so she must’ve seen that I needed a friend. I’m guessing here, but Daniel was the one who invited me into the kitchen when I was trying to get out of
being my father’s shadow.”
“Your father’s shadow?”
He nods. “He liked for me to follow him around so I could see how I should lead. You can probably imagine how a ten-year-old boy felt about that.” His voice
is dry.
I smile. “Yeah, I think I can.”
 “So, I started going to the kitchen, which you knew already. In the kitchen, Daniel worked any place the chef needed him.”
“Why?”
“The chef was harder on him than anyone else.”
I tilt my head up. “But why?”
His eyes smile into mine. “Because the chef was his mom.”
My eyes widen. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Which is why I thought his mom was the one to push Daniel into my life.”
“What did you do in there?”
“Any job that wouldn’t mean a ruined dish. I cleaned, and I fetched ingredients for anyone who needed it. I did a lot of stirring so the cooks could focus on
preparing other dishes.”
Understanding hits.
“And I’m guessing the last is how you nearly ended up as dinner?”
“Got it in one. I dropped something. Or… Daniel did.”
A smile lurks in the corner of my mind. “And you went diving in after it?”
He barks out a laugh. “Hey! There’s that sense of humor making another appearance.”
“So I’m right?”
“Daniel threw something at me. I didn’t know what it was, but I ducked out of the way and it landed in the soup with the biggest plop I’ve ever heard. Thinking
I would get into trouble if I ended up poisoning the pack, I tried to move the ingredients around with my spoon so I could figure out what it could be. What didn’t
help was that the pot was as big as I was.”
I try to envision Shay doing just that. “How did it go?”
“Not well, since I could never see to the bottom of the pot. All I ended up doing was drawing more attention.”
“Then what did you do?”
He doesn’t say a word, but his expression turns so sheepish that I can guess how he ended up in the soup was no accident.
“You didn’t,” I breathe.
Shay’s sigh is dramatic. “I may be alpha now, but that doesn’t mean I had a brain as a boy. So, I did what any idiot would do. I waited until the chef’s back
was turned and stuck my arm in the pot.”
I gape at him in horror.
“Daniel shouted my name, and I was already on edge, so I spun around and…”
My laughter bursts out of me and I clamp my hand over my mouth.
His lips twitch. “I fell into the soup.”
“No.” I’m laughing almost too hard to speak.
“I didn’t tell you the worst thing,” Shay continues.
“And that was?”
“The soup was fish.”
I laugh even harder, but he’s not finished yet.
“And that thing that Daniel threw into the pot…” Shay continues.
“Was?” I gasp.
“A stock cube, so…” he doesn’t have to finish.
“All your stirring would have done is melt it so you never would have found it.”
I dissolve into peals of laughter for the next several minutes as Shay observes me with a smile curving his lips.
Eventually, when my laughter has died down, he sighs. “So, yeah, I was on floor cleaning duty for a week, right alongside Daniel when he admitted what he’d
done.”
“But you didn’t have to do it. You could’ve left the kitchen and the chef wouldn’t have been able to force you to clean the floors.”
He nods. “That’s right. But I knew I wouldn’t. For the first time, I was like any other boy who gets into trouble and has to serve out his punishment. I felt…
normal.”
“So the kitchen became your new home.”
“Yes.”
For a moment we gaze at each other, and then it all comes back, the pain, Daniel’s death.
“She’s going to be devastated,” I say in a low voice.
“I know. But she won’t be surprised. Daniel was…” he shakes his head, “Daniel. He wouldn’t have died any other way.” After pulling me toward him, he
kisses my hair. “Grief hurts pup. But it’s always easier to bear when it’s shared.”
“You were lucky to know him.”
He nods. “I know. He was a good man.”
As darkness settles, I wrap my arms around his hips. “Do you have any other stories about him?”
I feel him smile against my hair. “I do.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Yes, pup. I can tell you.”
 15

“L exa?”
My eyelids flutter open. Shay perches naked on the edge of the bed. “Shay?”
“I’m going to check something out. Stay here.”
Instantly I’m wide awake. I don’t remember falling asleep, but during one of Shay’s stories about Daniel, I must have drifted off because it’s morning, and I’m
naked in bed with fresh sheets covering me to my neck.
Shay must’ve made up the bed and tucked me in. “I’ll come with you.”
He kisses my brow. “Sleep. I won’t be gone long.”
“What do you need to check out?”
He gazes down at me for so long that I know he’s thinking about lying. “Shay?” I sit up and rest my head against the headboard. “Tell me.”
When he releases a long sigh, my tension rises. “I heard something.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. It’s why I need to investigate.”
My eyes search his face. “Could it be Ewan? Maybe the fighting is over.”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “It’s not Ewan. This is something else.”
I study him for another minute, and then I shift to the edge of the bed. “I’m coming with you.”
Before I can get out of bed, Shay grips my arms and stops me. “I need you to stay here.”
“Shay,” I say in a steady voice as I can manage, “the last time you walked out of that door, you came back with a half-dead wolf. You’re not going alone.”
My voice breaks at the end, which ruins all my intentions of being the steady partner I’m trying to be.
“That won’t happen. I’ll—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I’m going with you.”
It’s not in my nature to argue back. It never has been. But this is too important, too big to say nothing and just agree. My nightmare of Shay’s dead blue-green
eyes warns me what could happen.
For several seconds, Shay doesn’t speak. “It’s important that I go alone, Lexa.”
“And it’s important that I go with you.”
Silence falls again, the tension ramping up because I’m not backing down, and it looks like neither is Shay.
His brow creases in a frown. “Pup, I—”
“I’m not a pup,” I interrupt as panic grips me that Shay’s about to walk out and never come back again. Or I’ll find the body of a white-gray wolf with dead
eyes hours from now.
He takes a hand from my arm and scrubs it over his face. “I know that. It just—”
“You say it slips out, but I don’t think it does. You don’t think I can look after myself. You never have.”
“Lexa—”
I pull myself free and stand. “Fine, go.”
Shay rises to his feet, but his eyes never leave mine. “You’re not thinking about following me, are you?”
For the first time, I hate how easily he reads me.
I turn away so he can’t see into my eyes, and through it, my heart.
A second later, his hands grip my shoulders and he turns me back to face him. “Lexa. Answer me?”
When I don’t respond, he shakes me. “Lexa?”
“You want me to do nothing while you walk into danger,” I say with my eyes on his chest. “What if you don’t come back?”
He jerks me hard against him. “I’m not walking into danger. Just investigating a sound. And I will come back.”
I push back against his chest until he releases me. “You don’t know that.”
“Nothing will happen.”
He chooses the wrong words to say. I feel all color drain from my face as a memory hits with the force of a punch to the gut. “That’s what he said,” I whisper.
“Who?” Shay asks.
“My dad. And do you know what happened?”
He shakes his head, but I can read in his eyes that he does.
“Everyone died. Everyone but me.”
Shay takes a step toward me, but I spin around, and before he can stop me, I reach for my wolf. The moment I’m a small brown wolf, I dart under the bed.
“Lexa?”
Ignoring him, I burrow as far away as I can get from him.
“You never have to hide from me.”
Closing my ears to the hurt in his voice, I squeeze my eyes shut.
After a long moment, he lets out a heavy breath and I hear him rise. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
Although his steps are silent, I know the moment he’s slipped out of the front door.
I lower my head between my paws and try to silence the growing fear that he won’t come back. That I will lose him the way I’ve lost everyone else in my life.
As the minutes tick by and Shay doesn’t return, my anxiety grows and grows.
If Shay was only going to investigate something—a sound, he said—then surely, he would’ve returned by now. Wouldn’t he?
Maybe something is wrong. Maybe he needs me.
Or maybe he’s dead already?
 The last thought makes a home for itself in my mind. It distracts me so much that I nearly miss it.
A soft whistle.
The song.
My heart contracts so hard that it hurts, but I’m not thinking about the pain. I’m too busy scrambling from under the bed to think of anything else.
I don’t remember shifting or throwing myself out of the door.
I nearly fall as I climb down the tree, but I don’t even think about slowing.
Aron is here. And Shay is out there. Alone.
I have to help him.
The soft whistle in the wind is easy to track. It’s like he wants me to hear it. So, I dart through the forest, light on my feet, as I run faster than I ever have
before.
And then I stop.
In front of me, far enough away that I couldn’t reach him no matter how fast I ran, is Shay. He’s still human as he crouches over something on the ground. A
body. I can’t tell if it’s one of the pack, or it’s someone else.
But that isn’t what stops my heart.
It’s what’s above him in the trees.
A hand strokes down my hair, a caress that makes my body shudder with revulsion.
As I stand frozen, the man responsible for so many of my nightmares steps close behind me and circles my waist with one arm.
His lips brush against the shell of my ear. “Look up, little songbird,” he murmurs in a voice so low that even this close to me, I barely hear him.
I’ve already seen the three men in the trees. But Aron’s finger tilts my head further back and I see what I missed before.
A small gasp slips free, and Shay tenses.
He jerks his head my way, but before he can, Aron clamps his hand over my mouth and tucks us behind a tree.
I can just make out Shay turning his head, first one way and then another. But he doesn’t see me, because he soon turns back to inspect the body.
My gaze returns to the trees above him. None are empty.
Aron’s men hang from them, their heads fixed on Shay.
An ambush.
Shay walked into an ambush.
Warm breath touches my ear. “He won’t survive this. You must know that.”
I count the men in the trees. Twenty. At least. And those are just the ones I can see. I missed some before, which means there might be more I haven’t spotted
yet.
“All we want is you. Fight, struggle, do anything that attracts his attention, and he will die. But come willingly, and he will live. What will it be, little songbird?”
There is only one answer to a question like that. Only one choice, and I make it without hesitation.
My nod is firm.
I feel his lips curve in a smile against my ear. “Good.”
His hand clamps tighter around my mouth as he draws me further back. “Kill him.”
I scream and fight, but Aron’s hold is absolute. He isn’t letting me go.
A hard blow on the back of my head makes my head ring before my world turns black.
 16

A sharp stone pokes me in the middle of the back.

It’s as I reach under myself to dislodge it that everything comes back.
Mine and Shay’s argument. Him leaving to investigate a sound. A whistle. The ambush. And then the blow to the back of the head.
I wrench my eyes open and sit up. Between then and now, night has fallen, and a few feet away, a fire burns. Roasting meat sears on the open flame.
My head screams in pain, but I ignore it. “Shay?” I scan the men sitting around the fire.
Faces turn toward me, but none of them are familiar. None of them are Shay.
“So our songbird has woken,” Aron murmurs as he rises from his crouch beside the fire.
The hated voice I spent months trying to forget burrows into my head.
“Where is Shay? Did you kill him?”
He doesn’t respond. I feel eyes pierce me, making me aware of how alone I am, and that the only thing covering me is my hair. I shift it around me so it covers
even more of my skin, and hunch into myself.
Aron plucks a long wood skewer from the fire and stalks over to me, making no attempt to cover his naked body.
When he offers it to me, I don’t move. “Did you kill him?”
“Take it.”
There’s as much of an order in his eyes as there is in his voice.
“I don’t want it. I just want—”
“To know if that mate of yours is dead or alive.” He waves the stick of charred meat in my face. What he doesn’t say is that his answering the question is
dependent on me taking it from him, but I see it.
So I take the skewer, even though I have no intention of eating it. My stomach feels hollow and empty, but I would rather starve.
His lips curve into a pleased smile. “Good. Now, come with me,” he says, holding his hand out.
I don’t want to touch him if I can help it. His hands are covered with the blood of my family.
“Lexa. My patience isn’t endless.”
Swallowing my revulsion, I put my hand in his, and he pulls me to my feet.
He doesn’t speak as he leads us away from the fire—just wanders at an easy pace as I trail him, the untouched skewer in my other hand.
The ground is still wet from the storm before and my toes sink into the earth, making a sucking noise each time. It’s not unpleasant. Just something to distract
me from the men.
They sit in the forest clearing, eating, talking, sleeping. Their eyes follow me as Aron moves around them. I’m not looking at a hundred men, but more like fifty
or even less than that.
I don’t know where we are now, but I doubt we’ve left Clayfell land. Which means there’s still a chance that Shay could save me.
If he’s still alive.
“A lot of men have died.”
Aron’s words wrench my gaze from the ground to his face. “That wasn’t Shay’s fault.”
“The pack is his.”
I understand what he isn’t saying. The deaths are Shay’s fault. “So you’ll kill him.”
He’s alive. Please let him be alive.
Aron would be rubbing his death in my face if he were dead.
“You’ll perform for us tonight. A song.”
I yank my hand free from his and stop walking. He takes three more steps before he notices I’m no longer beside him. “Lexa.”
“No.”
More heads turn my way. I drop the skewer and wrap my arms around myself. “I won’t do it.”
Aron takes a step toward me. I take one back.
“Lexa…”
“I said no.” I’m breathing too fast, but nothing in the world could make me slow down.
The blow comes out of nowhere.
My right shoulder takes the brunt of my fall. A shooting pain runs down my arm and makes my wrist throb in time to my right cheek.
“You seem to think that you have a choice about any of this.” I feel Aron move closer. His gaze burns through the back of my head as I stare at a small gray
stone an inch from my face. “Let me clear something up for you now before you force me to do more things that you won’t like. You don’t have a choice about
anything.”
The pain releases its grip on me one slow beat at a time.
“Get up.”
I push myself to my feet and turn to face Aron, but not to look him in the eye. I keep my gaze on his chest. If he saw the hatred burning in my eyes, it would
only invite another blow I won’t see coming.
He reaches a hand toward me, and I flinch. But this time he doesn’t hit me. What he does is a thousand times worse.
Gripping my chin so hard I know he’s leaving bruises behind, he jerks my head up to his.
For several seconds, he doesn’t say a word. “You will sing for the men tonight. You will do it as you are now, so the men can see the reward they and their
sons will get when you produce the shifter daughters they deserve.”
I will myself not to feel, or to even think.
“Do you understand?” His voice is whisper-quiet, but it’s like a roar in my ear.
 I nod.
“Good.”
Now that he’s finished with his threats, a wide smile stretches across his face, and his touch gentles. When he takes his hand from my chin and holds it palm up
to me, I know what will happen if I don’t take it. So I do.
“You don’t smell any different, so it’s a good thing we got you when we did.”
What does he mean, I don’t—
The answer makes me recoil. I’m not pregnant with Shay’s baby. That’s what he means.
If I were, I don’t even want to imagine what he would do to me, or our baby.
I keep silent as he leads me back to the ring of fire, except this time it’s not to sit. He marches me right to the front, to where most of the men are sitting, and he
stops.
After dropping my hand, he turns to me, a faint smile on his face. His touch is light as he brushes my hair behind my shoulder, so the men can see me. All of me.
Closing my eyes as tremors shake my body, I feel their attention like prickles of ants running all over me. I want nothing more than to brush them away, to
crush them beneath my feet.
“Now,” Aron breathes, as he takes his hands from my shoulder. “The song. You know the one.”
The one that killed my pack. And the song that the man I once thought was handsome asked me to sing one night for my family.
Right before he had his men slaughter them.
The song that I locked in my heart along with my voice.
“Lexa.” Aron’s bark makes me flinch.
I open my eyes and fix my gaze over the heads of the men sprawled out in front of me, at a point in the distance. Some of these men were there. They have just
as much blood on their hands as Aron.
After a long moment, I open my mouth and sing the song I swore I would take to my grave.
A tear slips down my cheek and falls. Then another. And another.
They never stop.
 17

“A lpha, we’ve got another body.”

Aron jerks at my arm, forcing me to stop, before swinging around to face the shout from behind us. “Where?” he calls back.
“East this time.”
Briefly, I close my eyes.
Good.
Throughout the night, and all morning as we trekked down through the forest, away from Wolfkeep land, men keep disappearing.
Sometimes bodies reappear a few miles away, their throats ripped out, but mostly they just disappear.
Shay. It has to be Shay.
“Tell ten men to shift and track. They don’t come back until he’s dead.”
I jerk my head to Aron to find that his gaze isn’t behind us anymore. It’s on me. After a pause, he smiles grimly. “Make it twenty. That’ll soon put a stop to
things.”
No.
Alarm spikes through me, and my heart lurches in my chest. I turn to face the front again before Aron can see how badly his order has terrified me.
Shay doesn’t stand a chance of killing the twenty wolves that Aron sends after him. Even if he somehow managed it, he would still have to get through the
circle of twenty or more men guarding me.
Please don’t let him be alone.
If he had help from his pack, maybe he could, but it was just us at the treehouse. Daniel said Ewan and the others were still fighting at the courtyard, so I just
have to hope he sees the wolves and won’t risk his life trying to fight them.
Don’t come after me, Shay. Just go back to the courtyard and live.
We’ve been walking for nearly two hours when another voice calls Aron.
He slows, and since he’s gripping my wrist in an unbreakable hold, much as he has been since we first set off in the morning, I stop too.
“What?” he snaps.
A blond man with a dark beard approaches with a lowered head, his steps hesitant.
He has bad news, and he doesn’t want to be the one to tell Aron.
From the dark glare on Aron’s face, he knows it.
“We’re missing more men,” the man murmurs, avoiding Aron’s gaze.
“How many?” Aron demands.
“Twenty.”
Aron doesn’t speak for several seconds, and I carefully keep my eyes on the blond man who looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here. I know the feeling.
“Where’s Isaac?” Aron snarls.
The blond man blinks. “Isaac?”
“He reported to me last.”
“He’s one of them.”
“One of what?” Aron’s voice is a pure growl that I barely understand.
“One of the men who's missing.”
Aron’s grip tightens around my already bruised wrist, and I cry out. The man darts a glance at me but doesn’t say a word.
“You said twenty men were missing,” Aron prompts. “Explain.”
“Uh, yeah. Twenty men and Isaac. So, twenty-one… Alpha.”
No one speaks.
In the long silence, the men around us edge away from Aron as if they can sense he’s on the brink of an explosion.
“You’re telling me that twenty men leave to investigate, and not one of them comes back?”
The blond man clears his throat. “Uh, yes.”
“Get the fuck out of my sight,” Aron snarls.
The man swings around and moves at a near run back the way he came.
I watch him go. I’m still watching him when Aron shoves me so hard against a tree that I cry out.
But I soon forget the pain in my back when I glimpse the darkness forming in his eyes. Something is coming, and it’s not going to be good.
“Paul!” he snaps.
A man from near the front responds instantly. “Alpha?”
Aron doesn’t take his eyes off mine. “Take five men and scout ahead. Find a cave where we can spend the night. Let’s see if Lexa is just as attractive a
prospect when she’s carrying another man’s child.”
Panic blinds me to everything but the need to escape. Now.
I fight to break out of Aron’s hold. I’m surrounded by his men, and I know I likely won’t get far, but now that I know what’s in store for me, I don’t care.
I have to get away.
This time it isn’t a palm that drives me off my feet, but a fist.
I sit stunned on the ground, one hand cupping my throbbing jaw and my eyes filled with tears.
“Try that again, and I’ll break your neck and leave your body for him to find. Do you understand?”
I know I’m valuable to him because I can give him something that no one else can. A born shifter girl. But right now, the coldness in his voice makes me believe
he’ll do it. So I nod.
 “Get up.”
The combination of the punch and a lack of food makes getting up a dizzying and slow task, but I push myself to my feet. The second I’m up, Aron grabs my
arm and goes back to dragging me through the forest at a pace that’s fine for his long legs, but means I will continue to spend the rest of the day half-running to
keep up.
As my legs burn with exertion, the same mantra runs over and over in my head.
Please don’t let there be a cave for a hundred miles. Please let Shay kill all of them before it’s night.
It’s all I think about, so I can almost ignore Aron’s grip on me and the slowly darkening sky, or that the last time I ate was back in the treehouse.
As night approaches, it gets colder and colder, until my teeth chatter and my feet feel like frozen blocks of ice.
I’ve just started worrying about frostbite when a man hurries toward us from the front. Aron slows.
My heart pounds harder with every step he approaches. I search the man’s expression so I can work out if it’s good news for me: more men are dead, or bad
news: they’ve found a cave.
“Alpha?” The man stops a few feet away.
“You’ve found a place?”
I hold my breath.
The man nods. “About a mile east. We should reach it before it’s fully dark.”
My eyes close, and I release a slow breath.
“Good. Go back and secure it. Start a fire and send a couple of men to hunt some meat.” I feel Aron’s gaze on the side of my face. “Set up the bedding in a
corner. I won’t be eating with the men.”
No. He’ll be busy doing something else.
Something that fills me with horror.
Footsteps move away, but I don’t open my eyes. “What’s the matter, Lexa?” Aron murmurs. He sounds like he’s smiling, pleased now that at least something
is going his way. “I thought all women liked babies.”
“Some do. It’s the rape most would have a problem with.”
Silence follows words I’d only intended to say in my head. With my eyes closed, I feel more of the other men—the last surviving ones—that is, turn to me.
When nothing immediately happens, I peel my eyelids open.
Although I brace myself for another slap or punch, it doesn’t come.
Aron releases my arm for a rare moment, but there’s no relief from freedom, because he stretches a hand toward my face.
I flinch.
His lips curve in a smile. Closing his fingers around my chin, he tilts my head up.
With a tree at my back and Aron close in front of me, I have no way of evading him when he lowers his face to mine.
I squeeze my eyes shut at the gentle kiss he presses against my lips, praying he won’t do more than that.
A second later, he lifts his head an inch. “Be careful, songbird,” he breathes against my lips, “or I will take that pretty voice away from you.”
As if I didn’t know what he meant, he drags his thumb across my throat.
When he steps away, I stand frozen in terror.
I’m almost relieved when he grabs my wrist, because at least he can’t kiss me while he’s dragging me through the forest.
But soon he won’t be. Soon we’ll stop, and then he’ll…
I stop feeling the cold after that. I stop feeling anything at all.
 18

T he moment we step into the cave, my eyes go to the furs piled up in the far corner.
All day I’ve been freezing. I’ve longed for heat, whether it was from a fire or a blanket. Anything that would warm me, even if it was for just five
minutes. But now that I’m in a cave with a large fire burning, I want to run in the other direction.
My body continues to shake. This time, it isn’t because I’m cold.
Aron drags me toward the furs.
Screaming, I fight him with everything I have.
I kept believing we wouldn’t get to the cave, that something would happen—that Shay would save me—before things got this far. And now, seeing the furs,
and knowing what’s coming next, means my time has run out.
I stop caring if Aron kills me. The alternative is much worse.
He shifts his grip to the back of my neck and shoves me harder.
Nothing I do even makes him slow.
My screams bounce against the walls and hurtle back into my face.
“Aron?”
Aron shoves me on top of the furs. “Not now.” He snarls at the man who called him, never taking his eyes off me.
I surge to my feet. He shoves me back down again, and I just miss cracking my head on the cave wall.
“Aron?”
“I said, not the fuck—”
A large white-gray wolf leaps on his back and takes him down to the ground.
I stare, disbelieving, because there was not a single hint that Shay was so close.
There’s no hesitation, no… anything. Just one minute Aron is throwing me on the fur, ready to rape me, and the next Shay is there, ripping his throat out.
Blood sprays me, the furs, and the walls but I barely feel it.
Is this a dream?
Shay releases Aron’s body and shifts before turning to me, his face granite-hard.
I must be in shock because I can’t process the fact that he’s here. It doesn’t feel real until he crosses over to me.
His hand lightly grips my chin and turns my head to the left. Although his expression doesn’t change as he examines the bruise from Aron’s punch, his eyes are
so cold that I know I’m seeing death in his eyes.
He doesn’t say a word, just gently returns my face to the front and draws a fur around my body. After helping me to my feet, he glances toward the cave
entrance. “Ewan, take her outside.”
Ewan is here?
As I’m thinking it, Shay’s beta comes into my line of vision—and that’s when I realize it isn’t just Ewan who’s here. Three other shifters are just as bloody, just
as grim-faced as Shay guard Aron’s men, who they’ve pushed to one side of the cave.
The men seem familiar enough that I know I must have seen them before, even if I can’t remember where. Maybe sitting in the courtyard, or maybe at the pack
gatherings.
I wait for Ewan to ask him why, but Shay’s beta doesn’t say a word, just takes my arm and guides me out of the cave. As I turn to peer over my shoulder, the
last thing I see is Shay stalking toward the men huddled on the floor, his hands clenched into tight fists.
From several feet away, I smell their terror.

Shay is silent as he swipes a damp cloth over my face.

His jaw is tight, and his eyes haven’t met mine since he found me in the cave and carried me to another of the cabins that the pack must use. This one is just as
rustic as the first we stayed in, except it has a large metal bathtub sitting in front of the roaring fire.
With the rest of the men waiting outside, it’s just me and Shay. At first, my attention was on his bruised and bloody knuckles. It looked like he’d beaten the
men to death, so I asked him as he carried me away from the cave why he didn’t rip out their throats.
He stopped long enough to stare into my face. Not my eyes, but the bruise on my jaw.
“They didn’t deserve a quick death.”
After that, he said nothing at all, and neither did I.
“Shay?” I whisper.
He doesn’t respond.
“Please don’t be angry with me.”
All movement stops. All except his eyes, which he jerks to my face. “You think I’m angry with you?”
“You think I handed myself to them, that I did what you told me not to do, don’t you?”
He doesn’t deny it. “I can guess what happened.”
His voice is flat. He is angry with me, even if he won’t admit it. His response, or lack of one, triggers my anger.
I push his hand away when he moves to clean the rest of the blood from my face and stand. “They were going to kill you.”
Shay follows me to his feet and tosses the cloth aside. “They wouldn’t have—”
Someone pushes the door open, but neither Shay nor I turn from each other. “Shay?” Ewan calls.
“You walked into an ambush,” I tell him.
 Shay’s eyes narrow. “When?”
“I heard a whistle, and I knew what it meant. I knew you were in trouble, so I went after you.”
Anger flares in his eyes. “Lexa, I told you—”
“There were in the trees.”
“I can handle—”
“Twenty of them. Those were just the ones that I could see, but I know there must have been more. I had a choice,” I plead, willing him to understand that I
didn’t do what I promised not to.
He stops trying to interrupt me, and behind us, Ewan leaves, closing the door firmly behind him.
“I could watch it happen, or I could do something to stop it.”
His hands flex. “And what did you do?”
“I chose to save you.”
When he doesn’t respond, I swing away. “Fine. Be angry, then. It doesn’t—”
He grabs me, crushes me against him, and slams his mouth against mine.
The shock of his kiss stuns me for a second. But only for a second.
In the next, I’m kissing him back just as eagerly.
I feel like I’ve barely started when Shay pulls away, breaking the kiss. His hand curves around my nape and he stares deep into my eyes.
“Ewan?” he calls out.
Ewan pushes the door open, letting a gust of cold air in. “Shay?”
He doesn’t take his eyes off me. “I won’t be needing you now. Find another cabin nearby with the rest of the men.”
“When should we come back?” Ewan asks.
Shay’s eyes search mine. “Don’t.”
My heart skips. “Shay?”
“My mate and I need time together. A lot of it.”
“Of course,” Ewan breathes.
When the door snicks shut, I know we’re alone again. “Shay? What about the pack?”
He sits me down again on my wooden chair and turns away. As I watch, he heads for the fireplace. After grabbing a cloth, he takes the large black pot which
hangs over the fire and tips steaming water into the large metal tub.
It looks as if he and the others planned not only how to rescue me, but what would happen after they had. Maybe someone else decided which cabin they’d
bring me to, but it could only have been Shay who thought of having hot water ready for me to bathe.
“The pack is fine. When the attackers suddenly stopped attacking and melted away, Ewan knew something must have happened.”
I lift my feet to the edge of my wooden chair and wrap my arms around my legs. “Something like them coming after us?”
He darts a glance at me before heading to the kitchen sink with the empty pot. “Something like that.”
As he refills it, I rest my chin on my knees. “Are they okay? No one died?”
He sighs. “There were quite a few injuries, some near-fatal. But the pack held firm, and no one died. Ewan did a good job holding them together.”
My gaze settles on his hand. “So it was just Daniel.”
Shay recrosses to the fire with the pot. “Just Daniel.”
“And the courtyard? Did it—”
“The pack is fine; the courtyard is fine. There’s one thing that isn’t.”
I lift my head to meet his eyes. “What’s that?”
“You.”
Shaking my head, I return my gaze to the fire and the pot hanging over it. “I’m okay.”
If I ignore all the things that Aron nearly did to me, my still-throbbing jaw, and my memory of the men waiting to kill Shay right in front of me—a sight that will
haunt my dreams forever—then I can almost believe it.
“Lexa?”
My gaze remains locked on the flickering flames. “Yeah?”
When Shay suddenly blocks my view, I blink in surprise, because I didn’t even see him move. He crouches in front of me, his eyes serious. “You remember
when we had a talk in front of a fire just like this one?”
After a moment, I do. “I had a nightmare, and you brought me back.”
“And what did I tell you?”
“That I shouldn’t hide when I’m hurt from you,” I admit in a small voice.
“And what are you doing now?”
Briefly, I close my eyes and sigh. How can he know me so well?
His hand strokes the hair back from my face. “Don’t do it again,” he murmurs before giving my lips a hard kiss.
I open my eyes and study him for a long moment in silence. “I don’t want to talk about any of it. I just want to pretend it never happened.”
He doesn’t seem the least bit surprised by my response. “I know. But like grief, trauma won’t hurt so much if you share it.”
“When you say things like that, you sound older than you are.”
His lips twitch. “Wise,” he corrects me as he rises to his feet. “The word you’re looking for is wise, as all alphas are.”
“Do they all have big heads to make room for their wisdom?”
The lip twitch kicks into a wide grin. “I was wrong. It’s not the alpha who’s wise, it’s his mate.” He holds a hand out for mine. “Up. Let's get you in the tub.”
“You’re always putting me in a bath,” I mumble as I close my hand around his and he pulls me to my feet.
“And I’ve told you why.”
Halfway to the steaming tub, a twig snaps outside and I jerk my head toward it, my heart racing. Aron is dead, I know that—but there were so many of his
men.
What if some of them got away? What if he told others what I was, and they come back to finish what he started? Shay sent Ewan and the others away, so
we’re alone here.
Shay could still die.
“Lexa? Lexa.”
Shay’s voice slowly penetrates, and I turn from the door to him. I get the sense it wasn’t the first, second, or third time he tried to call me. “Yeah?” I ask,
around my still racing heart.
“It was just a twig. There’s no one there.”
 I summon a smile. It’s weak, but I hope it’s enough to reassure Shay that I’m not about a second away from falling apart. “I know.” Although I continue
toward the tub, he doesn’t come with me. “Shay? You’re not moving.”
After giving me a searching look, he leads me to the bed. “I thought the water would relax you, but I think we need to talk first.”
Beside the bed, I look at the furs spread over the mattress and I don’t want to move. “I think I’d like to get in the bath.”
“Lexa?”
I can’t stop staring at the furs. I’m back at the cave, and I can feel Aron’s hands gripping my arms, shoving me down on the furs. Remembering the lust in his
eyes, I take a step back.
“Lexa?”
It’s hot in the cabin from the fire, but I can’t understand why my body is trembling so hard.
“Pup?”
The word penetrates my horror because only one person in the world would call me that. I tear my eyes from the furs and meet Shay’s concerned gaze. “I’m
not okay.”
He wraps his arms around me and draws me close, tucking me against his body, and pressing his mouth against my hair. “I know, baby.”
We stay that way for several minutes, just holding onto each other, until Shay releases me and takes a small step back.
“The pack will be okay for a while, so for now it’s just us. Instead of me deciding what you need, how about you tell me?” His lips twitch. “Since we alphas
have big heads to go along with this belief that we know everything.”
I don’t even have to think about what I want. “I’d like to get in the tub, but with you.”
He nods. “And then?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Okay,” he murmurs, “the tub it is. While we soak, you can think about what you want next, and we’ll do it. Whatever you want, baby.”
 19

I don’t mean to fall asleep.

Yet somehow, between the soothing water warming my skin, the press of Shay’s body wrapped behind and around mine, and his hands gently stroking
up and down my arms, I close my eyes.
When I open them again, my hair and body are dry, and I’m lying on my side in bed with Shay’s gaze on my face.
“I fell asleep,” I murmur.
His hand skims over my bare hip. “You weren’t the only one.”
“Oh.”
I must be half-sleep for me to be struggling to form coherent sentences, but talking in the dimly lit cabin with the fire still cheerfully burning doesn’t seem
necessary.
We just study each other, neither saying a word.
Long minutes later, I clear my throat. “Are Ewan and the others still in a cabin nearby?”
Shay’s gaze sharpens. “Aron and his men are all dead, Lexa. You’re safe now.”
It isn’t the question I asked, but just like always, Shay read my heart without my needing to speak. “But how do you know?”
He lifts his hand from my hip to thread his fingers with mine. It’s the same way we lay after we made love in the treehouse.
Thinking about our time there is bittersweet. I can’t remember ever being as happy, as content in a place in all my life, but also so filled with anguish as I
watched Daniel die after sacrificing himself to protect me and Shay.
“Because there were two groups of us who came after you. One group tracked you. The second group picked off as many of the men around you as they
could before the first group could rescue you.”
I don’t have to ask which one he was in. “What happened, Shay? You said you heard a noise. What was it?”
His hand briefly tightens around mine. “I thought I heard someone whistling.”
Although I think I’ve succeeded at keeping my face expressionless, Shay narrows his eyes. “What is it?”
I shake my head. “I’ll tell you after.”
After squeezing my hand, he continues. “The whistling stopped by the time you’d woken, and as you know, I left to find out what was going on. I didn’t have
to wander far to find a body.”
Now it’s my turn to tighten my hold on him. “One of ours?”
“No.”
“But?”
“Whoever killed him did it somewhere else and planted him near our treehouse, since there wasn’t enough blood around him for it to have happened there.”
“And then what?”
“It felt like an ambush, but I couldn’t see anyone.”
“They were in the trees above you,” I tell him. “They must have covered their scents.”
Shay nods. “I realized that later. They probably waded through the stream and then rolled around in the mud after.” He frowns. “And then suddenly I felt like
you were there.”
I tense, because we’re getting to the part of the story that I know Shay won’t want to hear. “You did?”
His gaze sharpens, revealing that he didn’t miss my reaction. “I did. But I couldn’t see you.”
“And then what happened?”
“I heard a whisper. It said—”
“Kill him,” I interrupt.
For several seconds, Shay doesn’t say a word. “You were there.”
I nod.
“What—”
“I’ll tell you after, but what happened to you?”
Shay releases my hand and shuffles closer so we’re pressed flush against each other, his arm wrapped around my back and mine over his hip.
“I shifted. It was a good thing I did because, by the time I had, shifters who seemed to come from nowhere had surrounded me.”
My hand tighten on his hip. “And then?” I breathe.
“I fought. I think I’d killed a couple before Ewan and some of my enforcers turned up. After that, it was easy, and once they were all dead, we shifted back.
As we headed back to the treehouse, Ewan filled me in on what had happened back at the courtyard. But when we got to the treehouse—”
“I wasn’t there.”
“No,” he murmurs against my hair. “You weren’t. So we left to track you.”
I stare at the wall in silence, wanting to apologize but knowing I don’t regret it. That I would make the same choice over and over, no matter how bad things
would’ve ended for me.
“I heard you sing.”
I jerk in surprise. Shay shifts us so I’m on my back and he’s braced on his arms over me. “You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in my life, but I
never want you to sing like that again.”
“Why not?”
“It sounded like your heart was breaking.”
Tears fill my eyes. “That’s because it was.”
His eyes search my face. “The song was the same as the whistle I heard.”
 I nod. “Yes.”
When I blink, a tear slides down my cheek. Shay kisses it away. “Never again.”
“What?”
“You will never hurt like that again. I swear it.” His voice trembles with the same determination I feel in my heart and see in his eyes.
Lifting my hand, I curve it around his jaw. “I don’t deserve you.”
“See, now that’s where we’re going to have to disagree. I don’t deserve you. Can you tell me what happened?”
It’s not a story I want to tell, not one bit of it, but I nod. “I heard the same whistle.”
Lying pinned beneath him makes me feel like no one can hurt me because Shay is there, shielding me with his body. I feel safe.
“You’d heard it before?” he asks.
I nod. “It meant Aron was here, and if he was, then he would kill you and take me.”
“Because of what you can give him?”
“Yes.”
Now we get to the part of the story that will lead to things I swore I would never talk about again. But Shay has to know them. My silence meant that a man
died. It meant his pack nearly died, because I thought running away made more sense than warning Shay about the danger I brought to Wolfkeep.
That has to stop.
I meet his eyes. “Aron was the first man to tell me I was beautiful, and for it to mean something.”
Shay doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t judge. He just listens.
“I was nineteen, and I wanted someone to look at me and want me—not because I was the alpha’s daughter, but because I was me.”
Shay nods. “I understand.”
“Aron said he was passing near our pack when he heard me singing.” I stop, just like that. It’s like the words stick in my throat and refuse to go any further.
“It’s okay, pup. Take your time. There’s no rush.”
After a long moment, the blockage in my throat clears. “It was a lie. But I didn’t find that out until later. The song was mine. I’d made it up because I liked to
sing, but I didn’t feel brave enough to share it with anyone. I thought everyone would laugh, so I would go into the forest on my own, and I would just sing.”
“You have a beautiful voice, pup. No one would laugh.”
His words draw a smile from me when I didn’t think I could. “You always think more of me than I am.”
“I only tell you what I see,” he murmurs. “It’s the truth.”
Although I search his gaze for any hint of doubt, I know I won’t find it.
I don’t know how, but I’ve been lucky enough to find a man who looks at me and sees everything he could want.
“I told him things I shouldn’t have,” I whisper, my eyes filling with tears. “And because I did, I killed my pack.”
Shay doesn’t speak for several seconds, but as I watch, anger—no, rage grows until his body shakes with it.
“Lexa,” he growls.
I lower my gaze to his chest, because now that he knows what I’ve done, he won’t want me anymore. He won’t look at me and see the woman he loves. He’ll
see someone who killed their pack, and who might one day do the same to his.
“Look at me,” he orders.
Why did I tell him? Why did I speak at all?
It takes more strength than I believed I possessed, but I do.
The rage hasn’t died. It’s only grown.
“You trusted someone who betrayed you. I’m not angry at you.” He squeezes his eyes shut. “I need to go back in time and make him suffer.”
I shake my head. “No. If I hadn’t—”
His eyes snap open. “If you hadn’t told him, he would have found some other reason—some other way to slip into your pack and destroy it.”
“No,” I whisper. “He wouldn’t need to—”
“You never asked me what I was doing near your pack. Do you want to know what brought me there?”
He’s right. “Yes.”
“We went for a run,” he murmurs, his eyes never leaving mine, “and when we reached the edge of pack land, I just kept going.”
I blink. “But your pack is hours from mine. You’re at the top of the mountain, and we were—”
“Near the bottom. But something called to me, and I couldn’t.” He shakes his head. “No, that isn’t right. I didn’t want to stop. It was you. I didn’t know it at
the time, but it was you. And do you know something I noticed about your pack?”
Now it’s my turn to shake my head.
“You said Aron heard you singing, and that drew him to you.”
“Yes.”
“Your pack was as remote as mine. Wasn’t it?”
My thoughts return to my pack, something I’ve tried to avoid thinking about for months. It hurts too much. “I rarely saw anyone,” I say in a voice just shy of a
whisper. “I think there were cabins that humans stayed in over the summer, but I hardly ever even heard them. It was always just us.”
Shay doesn’t look surprised by my answer. “So what were Aron and—I’m assuming here—his men doing there?”
I don’t have an answer for him.
“Because,” Shay continues, “the only trouble we’ve ever gotten when another pack has wandered close has never been by accident. It’s because they wanted
something from us and knew it before they stepped one foot onto pack land.”
His words are so similar to my father’s that I have to close my eyes to stop more tears from forming.
“Lexa?”
“Dad said they must want something,” I whisper.
“He knew they were there?”
I nod. “He thought they might be trouble, because some enforcer said they’d spotted men in our forests, but they always stayed away.” Opening my eyes
again, I meet his gaze head-on. “We were a friendly pack. If anyone needed help, we would have given it to them.”
“But they didn’t want help?”
“No. By the time I realized what they wanted, it was too late.”
Shay doesn’t ask what happened, but I read the question in his eyes. So I swallow my shame and my guilt, and I tell him. “I told Dad about the man I’d met in
the forest, who I thought just needed help and a place to stay. He—Aron came with some of his men. He said he’d heard me sing and wanted to know if anyone
else sang as beautifully as I did. Mom and Dad were surprised, because I never sang around anyone, and I think—”
My voice cracks and hot tears splash onto my cheeks. “They wanted me to be happy, and they thought he would do that for me. So when Aron said he would
like to listen to me sing again, this time at a concert, I agreed.”
 His fingers brush my tears away, but more continue to fall. “So you sang for your pack?”
“Before I did, something made me doubt Aron. I don’t know if it was a look or something he’d said. But I knew I couldn’t trust him. That I’d been wrong to
trust him from the start, and that I needed to tell Dad about what I’d told Aron.” I stop to swallow hard. “I tried to talk before, but Aron was there, and I think
Dad thought I was just nervous. He kissed my forehead and told me everything would be fine, that nothing bad would happen.”
“So you planned to speak to him after?” Shay guesses.
I squeeze my eyes shut as my mind takes me back to the pack gathered in a clearing near our homes, eating and laughing as they waited for me to sing. “I was
going to take Dad to our house, where Aron couldn’t hear me, and tell him after my song. But when I finished singing, Aron had his men in the forest slaughter
them.”
With my eyes still closed, I wait for Shay to blame me now that he knows what I did.
“They knew about you before they got there,” Shay murmurs in a low voice.
My eyes snap open. “What?”
He gazes down at me, his brow furrowed in concentration. “How many men were there?”
Swallowing hard, I try to think back. “I don’t know. A lot. There were fifty in my pack. But there had to be about the same in theirs. Maybe a little more. Dad
—” I blink several times. “Mom and Dad got me away, but Aron and his men followed us, so we had to run again. Mom died trying to protect me, and Dad tried
to make me run, but I couldn’t leave him. I think I passed out, so maybe they thought I was dead too. And then when I woke up, I knew everyone was dead.
Everyone but me. I don’t know how he found out I wasn’t. Maybe he came back and followed your tracks.”
“I’m sorry, baby.” Shay presses a soft kiss on my brow. “But there’s no reason for a pack that large to travel unless they were going to fight. You said Aron
asked if there were any other singers like you?”
“Yes,” I murmur. “What—”
“I don’t know whether someone said something, or he saw you shift and guessed there must be something different about you, but he brought those men with
one goal. To take you, and others like you.”
“But how could he—”
Shay shakes his head, his eyes troubled. “I don’t know, pup. But his being there with that many men doesn’t make sense. Not at all.”
When he falls silent, I gaze up at him as his words whirl over and over in my head. It makes sense. I never wondered how so many of his men could be there,
ready to attack. They couldn’t have just been passing through. There was nothing to see or do near us. Just us.
“Lexa?”
I blink. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He sighs. “He got you to lower your guard, pup. You were a sheltered nineteen-year-old, and Aron took advantage of you. It wasn’t your fault. It was his.”
“But I convinced Dad that he wasn’t a threat,” I whisper, wanting to make him understand. “I told him what I was.”
Shay lowers his head so we’re sharing the same air. “Lexa, he wanted his daughter to be happy. Aron saw that vulnerability and exploited it. Baby, you didn’t
kill your pack. Aron did.”
“But I—”
His kiss cuts me off. Soft and lingering, it’s so distracting that I lose myself in it.
When he lifts his head, my eyes flutter open.
“You did nothing wrong.” He gently shakes me. “You are not to blame for your pack’s death, and from now on, if I even think you’re blaming yourself for it, I
will kiss you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. How would you know what I was thinking?”
“I would know.”
As I peer up at him, I can’t argue, because he’s right. He always seems to know what I’m thinking.
“I can’t suddenly stop, Shay.” I frown. “I just can’t.”
“I know it’s going to take time, but promise me you’ll try. Can you do that?” He gazes searchingly into my eyes.
After a moment, I nod. “I’ll try.”
“And no hiding in silence. If you hurt, talk to me.”
“That might not be easy, either.”
I thought that if I didn’t speak, I couldn’t make the same mistake that I made before. But most of it is because I didn’t want to admit what I’d done. Even now,
the guilt is still there. “Sometimes it just seems safer to say nothing.”
“Baby, bad things happen even when you’re silent.”
I sigh. “I know that. I know it’s not logical. It just felt—”
“Like the only way you could protect everyone around you?”
“No,” I gently correct him. “It felt like it was the only way I could protect you. And I wouldn’t have to tell you what I’d done. But I won’t hide anymore—or
I’ll try not to.”
“Good,” he murmurs and lowers his head, kissing me softly on the lips.
“I wasn’t blaming myself then,” I say once he’s lifted his head.
He kisses me again. “No?”
I kiss him back, stroking my hand over his back. “No.”
“Well,” he says against my lips, “these kisses might be for another reason.”
“Reasons like what?” I breathe.
Although he lifts his head, he doesn’t speak for a long time. “Reasons like I’m having difficulty stopping myself from kissing the woman I love.” His lips curve in
a smile before he dips his head and gives me another of those soft, achingly sweet kisses that are melting my brain. “You know how I feel about you, baby. I’ve
never tried to hide it.”
“I think I—”
His next kiss cuts me off, and by the time he’s lifted his head, my mind is blank.
All I can do is blink up at him. “I can’t remember what I was saying.”
He grins down at me. “Good.”
When his next kiss lands on my jaw, and then my throat, my eyes flutter closed. “Shay?”
He kisses my shoulder. “Hmm?”
“I love you, too.”
“I know.”
“Even if you weren’t my mate, I would still love you.”
His kisses stop just above my breasts, and I peel my eyes open and meet his eyes. His expression is impossible to read. “What?”
 “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Know the exact words to say, that make me love you even more than I thought I already could?”
Burying my hands in his hair, I comb my fingers through the soft strands. “We’re made for each other.”
“No,” he murmurs. “That’s not it.”
For several seconds he studies me as if he’s trying to work out what that something is. After a moment, he shakes his head, a faint smile on his lips. “It’s you.
All of you.”
As I gaze back at him, I understand what he means.
Shay has always been beautiful to me, but it’s not just his face or his body that appeals to every part of me. It’s his kindness, his words, his ability to read me in
a way that no one else ever has.
It’s all of him.
“I know,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “You’re distracting me.”
“From what?”
He breaks our stare to press a soft kiss on my right breast. “You once told me about a dream you had,” he murmurs.
My fingers tighten in his hair as anticipation roils my belly. “I don’t know—”
“If you’ll like it?” Shay interrupts between kisses that make my breathing heavy.
As he strokes his hands over my breasts and continues to kiss his way down my body, I struggle to catch my breath. “If I’ll survive it.”
His smile warms my lower belly before he glances up. “You’ll survive it, baby.”
I think back to when he stroked me with his fingers, and I shake my head. That was when I learned there was a world of difference between dream Shay and
real Shay. “I don’t know.”
He kisses my lower belly and continues down. As he does, my body tenses as I brace myself for what’s coming. “Baby, relax.”
When his warm breath blows over me, it makes me tense even more. “I don’t think I can.”
He lifts his head and meets my eyes. “Lexa?”
“What?”
“Trust yourself to fall. I’ll catch you.”
“I know you will,” I say as his words deflate my rising tension. “There’s no one else I trust more.” My body sinks into the bed, and satisfaction fills his eyes.
“Good, baby,” he murmurs as he lowers his head.
His breath whispers over me and I clench his hair a little tighter. The first soft kisses are so light that my eyes flutter shut and I tip my head back.
“That feels so good,” I moan, as I shift restlessly beneath him.
He presses his lips against my inner thigh and I feel them curve into a smile. “The best is yet to come.”
If any other man told me that, I’d think they were just being arrogant. Cocky, even. But not Shay—not when I know what pleasure he’s capable of giving me.
He parts my legs even wider and lowers his mouth. That’s when I realize no amount of bracing could’ve prepared me for what comes next.
Shay feasts on me.
Endless hungry licks destroy my ability to think, to see, to do anything but hope this pleasure lasts forever. I go wild with it.
My hands are gripping his hair too tight, and my moans are so loud that no matter how far Ewan and the others are, they have to hear me. If by some miracle
they fail to hear my moans, when my climax tears through me, leaving me boneless and replete, they couldn’t miss my shrill scream.
When Shay’s lips brush across mine, I peel my eyelids open and gaze up at him for so long that amusement fills his eyes. “Baby? You look like you want to say
something, but you can’t find the words.”
I clear my throat. “Is it always like that?”
Shay settles his weight over mine, and after taking my hands, he laces them with his. “You want me to do it again?”
Yes.
“I think—” I moan when Shay tucks himself against me. His eyes flare with heat, but he doesn’t bury himself inside me yet.
“You think what?”
After releasing a breath, I try again. “I want to do the same for you.”
He doesn’t respond, and his expression is so blank that he’s impossible to read.
“Shay?”
“I have had one job almost all my life,” he murmurs, his eyes sober. “Do you know what that is?”
“Be alpha?”
“Protect the pack, stop anything that threatens the stability of the pack, think of nothing else but the pack. I give everything of myself to them. That’s all I’m
expected to do. Do you know how many times anyone has ever thought of giving back to me?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
He lowers his head. “Just you.”
“You’re not just alpha,” I murmur. “You’re my mate, and just as deserving of pleasure and happiness as everyone else is—more, even—because all you do is
give.”
“And there is it again,” he says, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “That ability you have to make me love you even more.”
“I hope it never goes away,” I murmur. “I hope you love me forever.”
“Baby, I will never stop,” he breathes against my lips.
I don’t wait for him to kiss me. His fingers tighten around mine as, with a low groan, he returns the kiss with an intensity I wasn’t expecting.
Long minutes later, Shay breaks the kiss and for several seconds does nothing but gaze into my eyes. I stare back as he stretches my arms over my head and
shifts his body over mine.
He slips into me, one slow inch at a time.
It’s a battle to keep my eyes locked on his, because I don’t want to look away. I want him to see how much pleasure he gives me, and I want to see the same
in his eyes. I lose the battle.
Moaning, my eyes flutter closed when he finally settles deep inside me.
He moves slowly, barely easing out of me at all. But each glide back inside draws another moan from me. If we did nothing else for the rest of my life, I would
die happy.
“Baby?” Shay groans.
“Hmmm?”
His mouth touches mine. “Let me see.”
 My eyes open.
If I had ever been in any doubt about how Shay felt about me, the need and the love that bleeds from his eyes and into mine would silence those thoughts
forever.
“I love you,” I gasp as each new stroke of his body into mine brings me closer to a deep well of pleasure that rises ever higher.
“I love you,” he breathes against my lips. Somehow, hearing the words makes me want him even more. The pleasure builds as I writhe beneath him.
He must sense I want more, or he reads it in my eyes, because he plunges deeper into me than before. We don’t look away as we move with increasing
urgency against each other.
I read the moment in his eyes before it happens.
Shay’s face tightens in pleasure and he strains deeper, his weight pinning me to the bed. A second later, my release grips me, making me cry out as I wrap my
legs around his hips and hold him against me.
We stay locked together.
I never want to let him go.
So I don’t.
Days pass the same way.
Shay and I make love all day, sit by the fire, and feed each other the food he prepares for us with our fingers.
At night, we shift and run together, so close his body is always brushing mine. And when we find a stream or a lake, we shift back to human form and swim for
hours.
We make love there too.
Sometimes a sound makes me jerk my head into the forest, but no one is ever there. Shay silences my fears as only he can, with soothing words, a gentle
touch, and endless reassurance.
In the night, when nightmares tear me from sleep with the memory of Shay’s dead eyes fresh in my mind, Shay is always there, holding me, comforting me.
Night after night, I wake less and less.
For five days we just love each other, and it’s the sort of happiness I never believed I would ever find.
I thought I would die with my pack. Was ready for it to happen.
It wasn’t just my body that was cold—it was my heart and my soul, too. But now all I feel is warmth and light. My pack is gone, but that doesn’t mean my life
is over.
Shay has given me a new one.
EP I L O G U E
 1 MONTH LATER

M y foot catches on a root. As I stumble, Shay slips his arm around my waist and draws me against his side, his brow furrowed in concern.
“You okay, baby?”
I smile up at him. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
A little of the concern fades. “You’re not tired? I can—”
“No,” I interrupt. “The walk is nice. You see, there’s this alpha I know who likes to carry me around so much, I think I’ve forgotten how to walk.”
He mock-growls at me, but a smile tugs on his bottom lip. “This alpha sounds like a dictator.”
Grinning, I wrap my arm around his hips. “He can be, but he makes love to me every night, so that almost makes up for his bossiness.”
I’m in his arms squealing with laughter a second later. I grab onto his shoulders and hold on tight as he spins me, my long, blonde hair streaming around us.
Once, I glimpse Ewan before he tucks himself behind a tree.
I used to think the reason he came with us was because Shay was still worried that some of Aron’s men would return. But in the weeks that have passed since
Aron kidnapped me, I’ve learned more about the Clayfells.
Every time Ewan glances at me, I've glimpsed the guilt stirring in his eyes that he wasn’t with us at the lake that day. His loyalty to Shay, and now me, means
that he is never far away—no matter what Shay orders.
“Your mind is drifting,” Shay murmurs as, finished spinning me, he returns me gently to my feet.
“It was,” I admit, “but not to anything bad. Now, are you going to tell me where you’re taking me?”
His lips curve. “Don’t have to. We’re here.”
“Since the only thing around us is trees,” I raise an eyebrow, “we can’t be where—”
Before I can finish, Shay grips my hips and turns me so I’m facing south. After he’s done that, he tilts my head up.
“Another treehouse?” I breathe as I narrow my eyes so I can see it a bit better, nearly hidden amongst the trees.
“Yes. It’s where we’re spending tonight.”
I glance over my shoulder at him. “But it’s the middle of the day. You told everyone we had somewhere to be before it got dark.”
“Oh, that,” he says, an innocent expression stamped on his face.
“There’s something else?” I ask, because there has to be.
Shay is never this innocent unless he’s hiding a surprise from me. I should know, because when I wake up beside him in my bedroom, which is now ours,
there’s been a constant stream of them—from flowers to small gifts to a new wardrobe.
“We’re in a forest. I think you’d notice if something was out of place,” he murmurs, again looking far too innocent.
I search the surrounding trees, but nothing draws my gaze. “There’s nothing here. Just trees.”
“Yes, just trees.”
My eyes return to his as I try to work out why he would bring me a short walk from the courtyard. Usually, when we have a few days together, he takes me
further away. We seem to always end up by a stream or a lake, because Shay knows how much I love the water. “So it’s a tree, then?”
He doesn’t say a word, just releases my hips and takes a step back.
This time, I take more care when scanning my surroundings.
On my second search, my eyes stop on something that I don’t know how I missed.
In a daze, I drift toward a tall ash tree. “Shay?” I breathe.
I feel his approach as he trails me. “Lexa?”
My eyes fill with tears. “Why am I looking at an engraving of my pack?”
His hands return to my hips. “Because you are.”
I turn away from the faces that someone has lovingly, with incredible detail, engraved on the tree, and meet Shay’s eyes. For several seconds, I don’t speak.
But then I clear my throat. “How did you know what they looked like?”
Sorrow fills his eyes. “I left instructions with my men to bury your old pack while I brought you back to Wolfkeep. One of my men found pictures, which he
gave to me. I’ve been waiting for the right time to give them to you.”
My hands grab for him. “You have pictures of my family?”
He nods. “My men collected everything they could and brought it all here. It’s in a room in the courtyard, so whenever you’re ready to see them, just tell me.”
When I think of confronting everything from my old life, it hurts. “I don’t know that I ever will be.”
He draws me close, and I rest my head against his chest as he wraps his arms around me. “You will. One day.”
“The engravings. Why here?”
“Because this is home, and this is the closest to the heart of the pack that we could do this. Your family—your pack—should be with you. Or at least close
enough that you can visit anytime you want.”
I lift my head and meet his eyes.
He gazes back at me, waiting for my reaction, or some response.
I don’t have one, because I never believed anyone could or would ever do something like this for me. That anyone could love me the way Shay does.
“Lexa?” Shay murmurs. “Is this not what you want?”
I brush tears from my eyes. “No, I do. You’re just doing that thing again.”
His eyes crease with confusion. “What thing?”
“Making me love you even more, when I didn’t think it was possible.”
He barks out a laugh. “Now you know how I feel.”
Because I still can’t believe it, I turn back to the tree. There were fifty people in my pack, and Shay had someone engrave every single face on it. The
engravings go so high that I can’t even see them all. But near eye level, I spot an important one.
 My fingers trace Dad’s face. “Even after Mom died, all he thought about was saving me.”
Shay wraps his arms around me, resting his hands on my belly. There’s not even a hint of a curve yet, but inside me, a new life is growing. “That’s what dads
do. And that’s what I’ll do for our child.”
I turn to face Shay as my heart contracts at the thought. “I don’t want to lose you.”
He tugs me close before pressing his lips against my brow. “And you won’t. But you and this baby mean more to me than anything in the world. I would die
happy if it meant you two lived.” Stepping back, he grips my chin and tilts my head up. “Now I’ve filled your eyes with tears, and I have to fix that.”
A reluctant smile tugs at my lips. “Because that’s what alphas do? Fix things?”
He swings me into his arms. “Because that’s what a man who loves a woman does. He never wants to see her cry.”
I circle my arms around his shoulders. “And how do you intend to fix things?”
On his way to the treehouse, he stops and peers into my eyes. “I have at least five things I’d like to do.”
“To me?” I whisper as desire creeps through my body.
“Yes, to you.”
“And what about me?”
He continues to the treehouse and prepares to climb.
“What five things do I get to do to you?” I ask.
Shay stops. “I’m going to fall out of the tree if you say things like that while I’m climbing.”
My burst of laughter surprises me. “No, you won’t. You’ll be carrying me.”
He presses me against the tree and lowers his head to mine. “I would never hurt you.”
“I know.” He’s not talking about falling from the tree, and neither am I. As I study his face, a thought tickles my mind—the same one that surprises me every
now and again. “Shay?”
“Yes, pup?”
“Will it always be like this?”
He doesn’t speak for a long time. Just studies me as if he’s seeing me for the first time. “Yes. I will never stop wanting or needing you with every bone in my
body.”
“And neither will I.”
His lips brush against mine. “You ready for me to climb, baby?”
I nod. “Yes. But first I want to give you something.”
Curiosity stirs in his eyes. “Give me what?”
After framing his face with my hands, I press my lips to his. He returns my kiss instantly. It goes on for much longer than I thought it would, but when I’ve
explored every inch of his mouth with my tongue, I break the kiss.
“That.”
A moment passes in silence.
And then he smiles, and it’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in my life. A second later, he dips his head again.
As we kiss beside the engraving of my pack, I feel how close they are to me. All Mom and Dad wanted was for me to be safe and happy.
With Shay, I will never be safer or happier anywhere else, or with anyone else.
I feel their joy, and their love, join with mine.
 EX C ER P T F R O M CO L D -B L O O D ED A L P H A

M y bare knees sink into soil that’s still damp from last night's rain.
The touch of the moon on my back is like a soft kiss. Cool, but welcome. And, even though my wolf is strangely silent, I know the moon soothes
her as much as it always has the human part of me.
I open my eyes and stare down at the space between my hands.
My shoulder-length hair forms a shield between me and the sharp gazes that surround me—surround us. My new mate. Dayne and I.
It's over now. Done.
Yet I don't move, and neither does he. Instead, he curves the long line of his body over mine, and a hot, muscled arm settles between my bare breasts as he
buries his face in the joint of my neck and shoulders.
His hot breath has tension coiling, anticipation thrumming through me.
But he doesn't do what I'm expecting. He doesn't bite me. Just holds me, as he works to steady his harsh breaths in the aftermath of our joining.
He's not alone in fighting for breath in this midnight darkness, as smoky-white tendrils of airy, lighted breath stir around us like spirits.
I can't quite believe this is real. Any of it.
My first time, with anyone, and it's at my moon-blessing ceremony in front of my pack, and with a virtual stranger.
If uncle had been kind, he'd have let Dayne and I meet before the ceremony so we could get to know each other a little beforehand. Then, I could've told him
I'd only ever played with the boys in my pack. I'd certainly never gone any further than that.
But no one could ever accuse Uncle Glynn of being kind, least of all to me.
I shift restlessly, unable to silence the rising tension Dayne has awakened, a fierce need I'm desperate for him to satisfy. Only I can't speak, or rather, I don't
dare to.
Making demands of anyone has only gotten me a slap, or worse. Usually, worse.
So, while Dayne found his release, I don't dare to ask for more.
I have a mate now. That should be enough, and I can finally leave. Wanting more is just being greedy.
Howls suddenly erupt around us.
Startled, I jerk my head up, taking a moment to process that it is for us, for a newly mated pairing. My hair shifts, and for the first time, my face is no longer
obscured by layers of dark-brown hair.
Dayne takes it as a sign the ceremony is over and jerks to his feet so fast that I'm not expecting it, nor am I prepared for his sudden absence. Which is when I
realize he was the only thing keeping me upright.
Without the strength of his arms around me, the muscles in my arms give out and I slump to the ground, only at the last possible second, managing to stop
myself from face planting.
Great, Talis. In front of the pack. In front of Dayne. Just fucking great.
But Dayne isn't paying the least bit of attention to me or to my watching pack. No. Out of the corner of my eye, I observe him stalking away, toward the
heavily wooded forest, and the house a couple of minutes’ walk away. Head proudly tossed back, completely uncaring of his nudity.
"Say your goodbyes. We leave tonight," Dayne announces in his low rumbling voice, just shy of a growl, before the thick forests swallow up his tall muscled
figure and he disappears from view.
Struggling to my feet on shaking knees, all I'm conscious of is that I'm naked while all around me my pack have the benefit of their wolf shape to preserve their
modesty.
Not even a second goes by before a hot flush of embarrassment creeps up my cheeks.
We shifters aren't usually so embarrassed by sex or nakedness since it's a part of who we are. Changing shape means there will always be a time before we
shift, and just after when others will see our naked form.
Except me.
I don't change shape anymore. It's not safe for anyone, but especially for me.
It takes everything I have in me to not rush over and snatch up my white silk robe from the ground. Instead, I force myself to appear nonchalant as I casually
stride over to the material lying neglected between me and my pack, their eyes glittering silver in the night.
Former pack, I correct myself. After tonight, they will no longer be my pack.
Bending down to retrieve it, a bare foot beats my fingers by a hairbreadth. Disbelieving, I stare at it. I would recognize that foot anywhere.
Lifting my head, I meet my uncle's eyes. They flash with malice.
So, nothing new there, then.
"You'll have to do better than that," he says with a smirk, "if you want to keep a hold of your new mate."
I flinch, since I can hardly ignore the fact that, seconds after our mating ceremony, my new mate is stalking away from me without a single backwards glance.
The barbs that hurt the most, the ones I can never shake free, are always the ones mired with truth.
"Yes, Uncle," I murmur.
"Alpha!" he snaps, inching forward.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I ease back a step, forcing my eyes from his and to the ground.
The rest of the pack are watching me. They've mostly all changed back to their human forms now. All except the submissives and those lower down in the
pack hierarchy, since it takes them much longer than the mere seconds it takes my uncle—an Alpha—to shift.
Predatory anticipation fills the air as they wait to see what my uncle will do to me this time. How will he punish me for whatever preconceived wrong or slight
I've done?
With Dayne's declaration that we're leaving tonight, he's snatched any opportunity for my uncle to strike out at me one last time. If he wants to do anything to
me, it has to be now.
 "Yes, Alpha," I tell the foot he still has on my robe.
His hand comes from nowhere, and suddenly I'm choking, my fingers scrabbling at his tight grip around my neck.
I go from standing to balancing on the very tips of my toes in a heartbeat, as he forces my heels and eyes from the ground. "Is that mockery I hear?"
Since I'm struggling to breathe, there's no way I can answer him. All I can do is hope he either drops me soon, or my new mate comes back. But what he'll do,
I don't know. The idea of Dayne Blackshaw saving anyone, least of all me, is ludicrous.
"Answer me!" Uncle snaps, as if I'm able to speak a single word at all.
Desperately, I shake my head no.
The sound that emerges from my throat is barely a gasp, and the edge of my vision is darkening as I sink into unconsciousness. Since this isn't the first time for
it to happen, I know how to read the signs better than anyone.
"Is there a problem?"
 EX C ER P T F R O M F R AC TU R ED

Finding my mate was supposed to be the best day of my life. Not the worst.
Everyone told me I should be lucky to have someone as beautiful as the blond-haired, blue-eyed, golden-skinned alpha, Shane Dacre, as my mate.
How can anyone feel lucky with a mate who only laughed when they were walking away from you?
For a year I took it.
I swallowed it all down: all the pain from his secret cruelties, all the disgust in his eyes when he looked at me, all the fury at my standing in the way of his true
happiness.
I ate it until nothing tasted the same. Until even my food tasted bitter.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the old alpha, Shane’s father, Iain, wasn’t pushing so hard for an heir.
The most stable packs had an alpha who prepared for the next generation, his father loved to remind Shane at every opportunity with a pointed look aimed my
way.
But the heir had to come from his mate’s body. Mine.
And so, he came to my bed, still smelling of her. The long blonde-haired, golden-eyed, and equally beautiful Bree.
With my eyes squeezed shut, and my face turned away from him, we would mate in silence to the sharp squeaking of the bedsprings.
The sound shamed me.
And once it was done. Once he was done, he would slip away again. To shower. To return to the one he wanted. To her.
But there was never a child.
It went on and on until the whispers grew so loud and the pity so overwhelming that I would do everything I could to avoid anyone and everyone. My mission
in life became to find the perfect hiding place in the extensive Dacre pack forest.
Perfect Shane could do no wrong. It must be plain, brown-haired, Aerin Boone with too many freckles. It must be Aerin who doesn’t deserve a mate as
perfect and golden as Shane Dacre who was the problem for the lack of an heir.
And then I was out running one day, losing myself in the pure joy of it. As a wolf, I found happiness I could never feel in my human skin. As a wolf, I could
pretend to be just a wolf and not a human girl with human pain.
But then I caught his scent. No, I could smell them.
Everything warned me to stay away, to return to the house, to turn back.
I didn’t listen.
They were in the stream; Bree and Shane.
And they were naked. He was holding her, and as she stared up into the blue sky, he thrust into her. At his every grunt, I flinched. At her every moan, I felt a
stabbing in my heart.
I’ve never known pain as sharp. It felt like inside I was dying.
Then he was growling, and she was clinging to his shoulders as she gasped out her release.
I couldn’t help but notice the way her nails dug into his biceps, and when I lifted my wolf's eyes back up to his face, I found him staring at me.
Being with her wasn’t a chore. Wasn’t some duty his father pressed on him.
I’d always known it, of course, but to see it, to see how much pleasure she gave him, and he gave her, was something else.
And that wasn’t all I saw. There was a bite on her neck.
He’d bitten her even though he already had a mate.
Me.
My pain poured out of me, ran over the grass and the water until Bree must have felt it because she was lifting her head from where she’d rested it on Shane’s
shoulder. Before she could, Shane slid his hand around her nape, halting her. Never taking his eyes from mine, he bent his head and kissed her.
So, I ran and I haven’t stopped running since then.
“Hey, you all right?”
The male voice, coming from much closer to me than should be possible with my shifter nose and ears, has me scrubbing at my wet face with my coat sleeve
before I turn away from the window.
His blue eyes are kind, and I wonder, not for the first time, why all the bus drivers I’ve met so far have been so nice to me.
Maybe it’s my age, since at twenty-two, more often than not, I’ve been the youngest person on the bus. “I’m fine, thank you. Are we here?”
Considering I’ve had my face glued to the window for hours, I should know. If I’d been paying attention to the world around me instead of reliving my
memories, I would know.
He raises his eyebrow but doesn’t comment on what has to be a pretty stupid question. “If Winter Lake is where you needed to be; yeah, we’re here.” He
nods at the window.
I turn to take in the town just outside.
It’s pretty in an old-fashioned way, with pastel-painted shop fronts and what looks like mom-and-pop stores.
No, not pretty, beautiful. A haven.
From where I’m sitting, I can make out a grocery store, post office, bank, hair salon, and a diner.
It looked like the perfect place to disappear when I saw a picture of the town on a postcard in a bus station gift shop. The sort of place no one would ever
come looking for me.
Perfect, in other words.
“What’s the population again?” I ask, unable to stop staring.
“Something like two thousand. But it’s a nice town. Friendly.”
That’s nothing. Coming from Minnesota, it’s a drop in the ocean.
 Sure, at first, I’ll stick out a little since I’m new, but who would think to look for me in a place with a population of two thousand people?
“I like it,” I declare.
His bark of laughter has me turning to find him grinning down at me.
“Not many young people do. You’ll find it’s the older folk who come here. To retire mostly.” And with that, the man in a bus driver's uniform strides down to
the front of the bus.
Once I’ve gathered my only piece of luggage—a medium size gray duffel bag, I toss my long dark braid over my shoulder and follow.
“Because there are no jobs?” I’m thinking now I should’ve thought this through a little more thoroughly since I’m going to need to find a job at some point.
After I ran away from Bree and Shane, I stopped at the house long enough to change, grab his wallet from the dresser, his keys, and then I headed for his car.
Not the flashy red sports car he was fond of reminding me had more purpose than I did, but the silver BMW I knew he wouldn’t miss as quickly as his pride
and joy.
As soon as I got into the city, I parked his car near the train station and went straight to the bank to withdraw as much money as I could.
Luckily, Shane’s dad had us legally registered as husband and wife even though we didn’t have a formal ceremony in a church. So, once I showed the bank
teller my ID with my married name, they didn’t stop me from my request of two thousand dollars, the most I could withdraw in one day.
I hit up Target and filled a shopping cart with food, clothes, and the gray duffel. After, I got a cab to the bus station where I bought six tickets heading in six
different directions from the front desk.
I hung about, waiting until the guy who worked there was busy serving another customer before I quickly bought another ticket at the self-service machine,
which was the bus I got on.
Although it seems a touch excessive, I knew I had to do everything I could to get away because no alpha ever lets his mate walk away. Because even though
Shane didn’t want me, there was no way he would ever let me go, especially with his father pushing him so hard to get me pregnant.
He might not want me, but he needed me.
I’d been running for five days when I started to get sick.
And that was when I knew.
I was pregnant.
 AL SO B Y EV E B ALE

Voracious Vampires of Las Vegas

The Lottery
Hellfire
Deepest Rage
Deepest Pain
Deepest Love

The Bladed
Hellfire
The Prodigy
The Heir
The Hunter

Cold-Blooded Alpha
Cold-Blooded Alpha
Hot-Blooded Alpha
Stone-Hearted Alpha
Iron-Hearted Alpha
Hard-Headed
Savage Alpha
Fierce Alpha

The Weakest Wolf (Cold-Blooded Alpha Spin-off)

The Weakest Wolf

Mate Rejected
Fractured
Shattered
Captured

Bladed Princess
The Lottery
Blood Guard
Shadow Guard
 TH A N K YO U

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