Chapter 4 WHAT IT MEANS TO BE OWNED

I have always believed there is a particular kind of grief that has no sound. Not the kind that comes out as weeping, or howling. The quiet kind. The kind that presses itself flat inside your chest and stays there, still and heavy, like a stone settling to the bottom of still water.

That was what I felt when we crossed my pack's border.

My heart clenched — once, hard — and I whimpered before I could stop myself. He answered with a growl, low and automatic, and readjusted his grip on my neck. The flesh there had gone tender and tight, and I was certain by then that I was already bruised. His teeth, when he pressed them in as warning, didn't break the skin — but they reminded me, each time, that breaking it was a choice he was simply not making yet.

I kept my eyes on the passing trees and said nothing.

Inside my head, Audrey was less quiet.

I'm done with this. We cannot be his mate.

WHAT?

Her fury hit me like a wall. I had expected irritation. I had not expected the sheer, offended outrage of a wolf who felt I was rejecting something sacred.

We have waited our whole life for this. Our whole life, Jenna. And you want to — what? Walk away? Reject him? What is wrong with you?

I growled — a sound that existed only between the two of us — and pushed her back hard. The effort of holding the door shut against her was not small. She battered at it with everything she had, while I focused on the ground moving beneath us, on the trees, on the sounds of his wolves spreading out through the undergrowth and then, gradually, dissolving ahead toward their own territory.

By the time I had control of myself, I could feel his land approaching the way you feel weather before it arrives — a change in the air, a shift in the pressure of things. His pack had already gone ahead. We were alone.

I waited.

Then I turned my neck, snapped at him, and shifted.

—

The transformation was fast — bones cracking back through their familiar sequence, fur dissolving, the summer air arriving cool and immediate against my bare skin. I covered myself quickly, straightened, and turned to face him.

He stood a few feet away — still in his wolf form, enormous and grey, his massive head tilted to one side with an expression that was, if I am being precise about it, almost curious. As though I were a creature he had not encountered before and was deciding how to classify.

"Stay away from me," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Leave me alone."

The crack of his bones filled the silence. He rose — and stood before me in human form, entirely unbothered by his nakedness, entirely unbothered by the blood my claws had not yet drawn but were promising to. A smirk moved across his face like something slow and inevitable.

"Listen," he said, with the patience of a man who has never once had to ask for anything twice. "I defeated your pack. I defeated your Alpha. I could have claimed his land — I was going to." He let that settle. "Instead, I claimed you. There is nothing to go back to. You are mine."

His eyes shifted — the edges of them darkening, his wolf close and watching from behind the hazel.

I felt my fangs descend.

"I don't want you as my mate," I said.

He stepped forward. I held my ground and growled, and to his credit — or perhaps to his irritation — he stopped. His eyes went blue at the edges. His wolf, then, was not as indifferent as he was pretending to be.

"Mate," he said, with forced quiet. "Stop. Walk with me toward the land."

"You don't even know my name."

The words came out before I had planned them, and they landed differently than I expected. Something moved across his face — brief and unreadable and quickly shuttered.

"My name," I said again, louder, and I felt my claws slide out from my fingertips, "is not 'Mate.' And I am not going anywhere with you. Let me go back."

I took a step back. My shoulders found the tree behind me at the same moment he moved — and the speed of it was wrong, the way powerful things are always slightly wrong in person, faster than the mind can process. One breath he was five feet away. The next, his arms were braced against the bark on either side of my head, and his scent — pine and woodsmoke and something darker beneath it — filled my lungs entirely.

Audrey surged forward.

I shoved her back.

I tried to claw him. He caught my wrists and pinned them above me against the bark, his grip firm and final, and his eyes were almost entirely blue now — his wolf having decided, apparently, that Alcander was not handling this adequately.

"YOU WOULD NOT DISRESPECT ME." The growl came from somewhere below language, below reason, from a place that was pure and absolute and very old. "YOU WOULD NEVER SEE THAT PACK AGAIN. YOU ARE MINE."

He pressed his face into my neck. I felt him inhale — deeply, the way people breathe in something they have been starving for — and every rational thought in my body screamed at me about what I did next.

I brought my knee up.

I was aiming for a specific target. I missed, slightly. But I did not miss entirely. He folded — not much, not enough to drop him, but enough to release my wrists — and I used every second of the opening I'd made. I swept my claws across his chest, his arms, his neck. Not a warning. Not a performance. Flesh opened beneath my hands, and blood followed, dark and certain, and I did not stop.

He roared and dragged me in.

Not in anger. Which was somehow worse. He wrapped his arms around mine and pulled them flat to my sides and simply held me there while I thrashed — while I snapped at the air beside his jaw, while I pressed every piece of strength I had against the cage of his arms and found it, infuriatingly, immovable.

"STOP."

His wolf's voice, not his. The command registered in my body before my mind agreed to it. I went still without deciding to, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever stood inside.

I looked up at him. His eyes were entirely blue. He was breathing hard, his chest moving against my pinned arms with each breath, the wounds I'd opened already beginning to slow. He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he lifted me — simply, efficiently, the way you lift something that belongs to you — shifted me to his hip, and began to walk.

I gripped his waist to keep from falling. My claws were still out. He growled, once, in warning. I loosened my grip and stared at the ground — at his feet moving through dry leaves and broken twigs — because the alternative was looking directly at the architecture of the situation, and I was not prepared for that yet.

—

His territory was larger than I had imagined. We crossed the border and I saw wolves moving freely. Someone jogged toward us and stopped when Alcander growled. Every man and woman we passed dropped their eyes immediately, without hesitation, the way people do in places where looking up has consequences.

He did not slow. He did not look at any of them.

We passed the pack house — I recognised it by the traffic, people moving in and out of it with the easy purpose of daily life — and continued down a dirt trail to a two-storey house that sat apart from the rest. He walked in without pausing. The door slammed behind us. He took the stairs and a hallway and entered a room at the end of it with the same energy he had applied to the entire evening: directly, without apology.

He shifted his grip and threw me onto the bed.

I bounced, rolled to the far edge, and was on my feet before he had taken a step toward it. I put the bed between us. My claws were back out. My fangs were down. My lip was curled, and I held his gaze with everything I had, willing him to understand that nothing about me was going to cooperate easily or quietly or without cost.

He stood at the foot of the bed — fists at his sides, muscles coiled, a low growl running beneath his breath like an engine that hadn't been switched off. His eyes moved over me slowly, and my skin turned hot with the attention of it, which I resented with every cell I had.

TOUCH HIM, Audrey screamed. LET ME TALK TO HIM. TOUCH MATE —

I slammed my hands to my head. My claws found my scalp before I thought to stop them, and I felt the thin sting of it, the warmth of blood at my hairline, but I pushed her back — back and down and away — until she was quiet, until the room was just me and him and the sound of both of us breathing hard.

When I looked up, his eyes had shifted — half hazel, half blue, the exact shade of a man fighting with the thing inside him that had already decided. I imagined mine were doing something similar. Audrey's eyes are pale grey, quiet and wild at once. Mine are plain brown. Whatever they looked like in that moment, I did not want to know.

"Leave me alone, Alcander."

I said his name deliberately. Slowly. As though it were the only weapon I had left, and I intended to use it.

He breathed out. Just one word.

"No."

I already knew it was true. I had known since before I said it. So I did the only thing left to do: I turned, crossed the room, and put my hand on the first door I reached. I had no idea what was behind it. I didn't care.

I walked in. I locked it behind me.

And I stood in the dark of whatever room it was, pressing my back against the door, listening to the silence on the other side — waiting to see if he would break it.

He didn't.

Which told me, more than anything else he had said or done, that I was going to have to learn a great deal about this man.

Starting with how to survive him.