Chapter 3
Reilly
I came awake with his name in my mouth and my hand already between my legs.
Three years and the dream still used the same cabin.
Floorboards. Lamp. His weight. In this one he had not let me get dressed.
He had knotted me a second time facing the door so that if anyone opened it they would have seen him buried in me to the lock, my tits against the wood, his mouth on the back of my neck.
I had come in the dream with my cheek on the door and his come pumping into me with nowhere to go.
I came half out of it in my own bed with two fingers on my clit and my underwear shoved aside and my thighs shaking, and then the waking finished and the orgasm died on me like it always did.
I lay there and worked myself anyway.
I knew how I liked it. I had known before him.
Two fingers in, heel of my palm on my clit, other hand on my breast, pinch the nipple hard enough to sting.
I did all of it. I was soaked. The sheet under my ass was wet.
I could still feel the dream-knot like a bruise inside me that was not there.
I fucked my fingers and chased it and got close enough that my hips lifted off the bed and then the bond pulled the wrong direction, toward a man who was not in the room, and my body stopped.
I pulled my hand out and stared at the ceiling.
My fingers were shiny. I could smell myself. Under that, for one stupid second, I could smell him, which was not possible unless the bond was doing the thing it did when the heat came without a calendar. No warning. No moon I could track. Just wet and empty and angry.
I got up before I tried again. Trying twice in a row only made it worse.
The bath house off my rooms was already half-warm from the stove Edward had lit in the hall.
I filled the tub and got in and the water sloshed over my sore nipples and I hissed.
I washed between my legs and that was a mistake.
Cloth on my clit and I was rocking on nothing, mouth open, free hand gripping the rim.
I put my wrist in my mouth and bit down so I would not say his name loud enough for the hall to hear.
I rubbed in tight circles until my legs shook and the water slapped the sides and I still did not finish.
I bit harder. Skin broke. Blood in the bath.
I stopped because I was going to crack the tub or cry and I was not doing the second one over a man I had thrown off my ridge.
I got out. I wrapped my wrist. I put on patrol clothes and bound my breasts flat and ignored that the binding scraped nipples that were still tight. I did not look at the bed. The wet spot would dry or it would not.
Edward was in the kitchen with bread and a look he had learned not to put words to. Twenty now. Taller than me. He saw the cloth on my wrist and didn’t ask. He had stopped asking in the second year.
“South fence is down again,” he said. “Marshall wants you before you take the loop.”
“Hillsford?”
“Wind, he says. I’m not sure he believes himself.”
I ate standing up. The bread sat in my mouth like paper. Heat still sat between my legs like a second pulse. I drank water and it did not help.
“You didn’t sleep,” Edward said.
“I slept.”
“You shouted.”
I looked at him. He looked back, not cruel. He had heard Owen’s name. He had heard it before. He was kind enough not to repeat it.
“Stay off the south road today,” I said. “Take two men if you go anywhere.”
“I’m not fifteen.”
“You’re not thirty either. Do it.”
He nodded once. I went to find Marshall.
Landers Ridge at dawn three years later looked like a pack that had learned how to be hungry without saying the word.
The hall still stood. The barns still stood.
The grain store had a lock on it that we had not needed when my father was alive.
Two boys who should have been in training were mending a fence with wire we had already used twice.
A woman from the lower houses nodded at me and hid the fact that her coat was his coat cut down.
We were late on levies to Hillsford. We were late on everything.
Gareth’s last letter had used the word protection four times and the word wedding once, which was him being polite.
Marshall met me at the yard with his jaw already set. He glanced at my wrist and then away.
“Patrol first,” I said.
“Council after. Idony has paper.”
“Hillsford paper or ours.”
“Both.”
We took the loop with four wolves. The south pasture was chewed down.
The dead scout from three years ago was a story the younger ones told wrong.
The river was low. I smelled Hillsford on the west cut the way you smell a stove that has been left on in a house you do not live in anymore.
Not a full crossing. Traffic. Men moving where they should not have needed to move if the alliance meant what Alexander Hills said it meant.
My body did not care about the west cut.
Halfway through the loop the heat spiked so hard I missed a step.
Wet through the underwear I had put on clean twenty minutes after the bath.
My clit throbbed in time with my walking.
I tasted Owen in my mouth and there was nothing there.
I stopped at the marker—the same marker he had used—and pretended I was checking tracks.
Marshall waited. He had been waiting three years. He was a good beta. He did not ask why I hated this stretch of river.
There were tracks. Not ours. Not quite Hillsford boots either. Heavier. A group that did not drag their feet like raiders and did not step clean like a formal patrol. Free company, if I had to guess. Contract work. They had cut west of my line and not come in.
“How many,” I said.
“Eight, maybe ten. Yesterday or the day before.”
“Heading.”
“Western range. Could be passing through.”
Could be. I crouched and put my fingers in a print anyway, which gave me nothing except cold mud and the excuse to stay bent over until I could stand without anyone seeing my face.
I had tried other hands.
Once, a year after the rite, a visiting enforcer from a pack that still paid us in meat instead of letters.
He was fine. He was willing. I took him to a room that was not the cabin and let him fuck me on my back with my knees up and his mouth on my breast. He was not small.
He did the work. I got close and then my body locked and I had to push him off before I put my nails in his throat for not being someone else.
I used my own hand after he left and still did not come.
I did not try a person again. I used my fingers and a cloth and, one ugly winter, the rounded end of a hairbrush in the bath, and I could get to the edge and live there until I wanted to scream, and I could not go over unless the dream did it for me and even then waking stole it.
I stood up. Marshall was looking at the tree line, not at me.
“Council,” I said.
We walked back. The hall smelled like boiled grain and wet wool. Idony Vetch had the table already set with paper like paper could feed people. She looked at my wrist too. I sat down before she could turn it into a question.
“Levies,” she said. “We’re short. Hillsford has noticed. Gareth writes that his father is prepared to be generous if the wedding date is set before the next moon.”
“Gareth can wait.”
“Gareth has waited two years longer than his father wanted.”
Edward slipped in and took the wall. I let him stay. He needed to hear what the pack was being sold for.
Marshall set another sheet on the table. Not Hillsford’s seal. No seal. A contract notice copied in a hand I did not know, passed through two packs and a trader who still came up the ridge when he thought we could pay.
Free company work on the western range. Cattle moved. A border kept that no sitting alpha wanted to admit he had lost. Payment in coin and meat. Twenty-odd wolves. The name at the bottom was not supposed to be a name I still said in my sleep.
Owen Tillson.
I read it twice. The letters did not change.
Idony watched my face. “You know him.”
“I rejected him,” I said. “That’s not the same as not knowing him.”
“He’s been taking work for a year,” Marshall said. “Clean jobs. Mean reputation. No banner. No Luna. If those tracks at the marker are his, he’s closer than this paper says.”
The heat in my belly answered the name like it had been waiting for print.
I felt myself get wetter in the chair. I crossed my legs and it made it worse.
My nipples went tight under the binding and I thought, very clearly, of his mouth on them on the cabin floor, the drag of his teeth, the way he had looked at me when he shoved the knot in.
I kept my voice flat. “Is he coming here.”
“Not according to this,” Marshall said. “According to this he’s two ranges over.”
“And according to the mud he’s on our river.”
“Could be a different company.”
“It isn’t.”
I did not explain how I knew. The bond had been a sour line in my chest for three years, always west of wherever I stood. This morning it was closer. I had thought that was the dream. It was not only the dream.
Idony folded her hands. “If Tillson is on our ground, Hillsford will call it a provocation. They already want a reason. You keeping a rejected mate’s name out of your mouth will not help if his wolves are leaving prints at the marker.”
“He is not my mate.”
“You said the rite,” Idony said. “I was there. The bond did not die. Anyone with a nose can tell you that when the wind is wrong. Gareth will use it.”
Edward’s voice came from the wall, careful. “Is he dangerous to us.”
Yes. Not in the way they meant.
“He’s dangerous to Hillsford’s story,” I said. “That’s why they want him dead or gone. If he’s selling contracts on the western range, he’s not gone.”
Marshall waited. He had the look he wore when he already knew what I was going to do and wanted me to say it so he could argue after.
“I want the full contract,” I said. “Not this copy. Who hired him. What the job actually is. Whether he intends to cross.”
“And if he does,” Idony said.