1. Prologue #2
He had been on his feet since five that morning, driving two delivery routes himself because their one driver was out sick.
He’d eaten lunch standing at the dock because there hadn’t been time to sit down.
None of it had touched him. He was twenty-three years old, and tomorrow he was going to stand in front of the pack elders with Audrey beside him and say the fated mate claiming words out loud for the first time.
This was their life. Tomorrow already certain. He was not a man who counted his luck, but tonight he was going to start.
They heard the trucks before the headlights came through the window.
Audrey straightened. Her hands dropped from his collar.
“That’s my uncle’s truck,” she said.
There were two of them, by the sound—the rough idle of well-used farm vehicles. Elias was already moving before the door opened, the wolf forward before his mind had formed a question.
Corvin Marsh came through first. Elias knew him to be a hardscrabble farmer of two hundred acres of failing wheat outside Larkin.
A man who watched as the land gave back less and less each season while Larkin grew and the men who’d built things in it prospered.
According to Audrey, he wasn’t a stupid man, only bitter.
He’d watched the wolves of Larkin build businesses, buy property, hire human workers, and send their children to the same schools as everyone else.
Somewhere in those years he had decided this explained what had gone wrong for him.
Three others came in behind him—farmers Elias recognized from the local hardware counter, from the edge of every gathering place where men from the outlying farms came to spend money they didn’t have and resent the people who had more of it.
They were not drunk. They were deliberate. Someone had planned what they wanted to happen tonight.
“Audrey.” Corvin didn’t look at Elias. “Get your things.”
“No.” She said it flatly. She had decided before they walked in.
“You’re coming home before you make the biggest mistake of your life.”
“It’s already done. I made my choice months ago. Tomorrow we make it formal in front of his family and the pack, and that’s the end of this conversation.”
Corvin looked at Elias for the first time. Not hatred, exactly, but something closer to resentment and resignation. It was the look of a man who had spent years assigning blame to everyone else and never taking accountability.
“Your kind never belonged here,” he said.
“My kind built this business,” Elias said. He kept his voice level. The wolf was reading the room—four heartbeats, their positions, the heat off bodies running on adrenaline and righteousness.
The two near the door watched Elias with the suspicion that he was extremely dangerous. The one near the back wall was barely out of his teens, already uncertain about what he’d walked into. Corvin was at the center, not uncertain at all.
Elias had known this was coming. Not tonight and not these men specifically, but something like it.
The human families outside Larkin had been watching the wolves succeed for twenty years, and what had started as unease had curdled into something harder.
Corvin Marsh wasn’t the beginning of it.
He was what happened when years of resentment found a man willing to act on it.
“A dozen people in this city make a good living working for my family. We’ve carved out our place here. Audrey is going to be my wife. You can leave now or tell me plainly what you came here to do.”
What they came to do was take her.
The two near the door moved together toward Audrey, not Elias. They had calculated that a wolf who loved a woman would hold back rather than frighten her with what he was capable of.
They had it badly wrong.
He crossed the room even as he felt the change start.
The first man went down before he understood what had reached him.
The second caught Elias’s elbow across his face and hit the wall.
Corvin was shouting. The young one had his hands on Audrey’s arm, trying to drag her to the door.
She fought, kicking and screaming, looking back at Elias, her eyes pleading.
That was when Corvin pulled the gun.
It was for Elias. He could see that now. The plan had been for leverage—to hold him back long enough to get Audrey into a truck and across the county line. Far enough that the pack couldn’t follow without consequences neither side wanted. The gun was restraint, not execution.
Audrey saw it before he did. With a scream, she wrenched herself away from the boy and stepped between her uncle and Elias. Her hand reached out for Corvin’s arm.
The explosion filled the enclosed space, leaving a vacuum of sound in its wake.
Audrey dropped.
Elias caught her on the way to the floor, cradling her head before it hit.
What erupted out of him in those seconds was not Elias Coulter at twenty-three, a bonding with his fated mate in the morning, or plans to build a small house they could grow their family in.
What came out was three inches of claws past his fingers, eyes turned bright amber with nothing of a man left in them.
And a keening howl that emanated from his chest, splitting the night air.
Corvin didn’t hesitate. He went out the dock door first, the others scrambling behind him—all of them running from what they’d seen when the man stopped being a man and became a wolf.
He didn’t chase them even though the wolf screamed for it. He held it together because his mate was on the floor and blood was spreading around her. So fast, so red, Elias could barely breathe.
He bent over her. The claws were gone by the time his knees hit the floor—he didn’t remember pulling them back, only that it happened because she was still here and she needed him to be the man now, not the wolf.
Her hand found his face.
“Elias.”
“I have you.” His voice came out too low, too fractured. “I have you. Look at me, Audrey…”
“I know what I chose,” she said. Her voice was steady, but a whisper now. “I knew from the first time I saw you. I’d do it all over again.”
“Stay.” The word broke apart in his mouth. “Stay with me, Audrey.”
“I choose you,” she said.
Her hand dropped.
The bond didn’t break. He had never thought about what would happen if the inconceivable happened.
Death didn’t close the door cleanly, swinging shut on fate.
Instead, it thinned to a thread and held, open on his end, running into nothingness.
He pulled her closer and pressed his face into her hair and stayed there.
He didn’t hear his brother Greer arrive. He barely felt his hand come down on his shoulder. There were no words, no questions. Greer was twenty-six years old, and he knew there was nothing that could be said or done to alleviate the agony his best friend was going through.
The tears rolled down his cheeks, creating a dark, wet circle on Audrey’s pale pink blouse. It was all he could give her now. Greer’s hand stayed on his shoulder.
He didn’t know yet what this night would make of him.
None of it was enough.
Nothing would ever be enough.