Chapter 30 Alpha Jealousy
Dominic POV
I smelled him on her before she reached the kitchen.
Liza came through the lodge corridor in yesterday’s patrol layers with her hair pulled back. Her own scent, and under it pine resin and cold stone. Everett’s smell clung to her skin from sleeping pressed against him through the night.
My wolf slammed against my ribs.
I was standing at the kitchen counter with a full mug of coffee. The West kitchen smelled of woodsmoke and bacon grease.
Liza stopped in the doorway. She knew I could smell him. She offered no apology or explanation, and the fated bond between us pulsed with the uncertainty of a decision she hadn’t finished making.
“Morning,” she said.
The mug came down hard on the counter, and coffee pooled on the wood.
The bond drove the jealousy into my ribs, right where Kurt’s teeth had torn me open.
The half-healed wound throbbed as I imagined losing her.
My wolf didn’t care about nuance or everything Liza and I had built over weeks of patience and restraint.
My wolf read Everett Pryce as a rival Alpha inside my territory, sleeping with my mate, and wanted him on the floor with my teeth in his throat.
I breathed through it.
“Did last night change anything?” I asked.
Liza crossed to the counter and took a clean mug from the shelf. She poured coffee with hands that didn’t shake. I watched her fingers on the handle, the same fingers that had been in Everett’s hair, and my gut clenched at the image.
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
“I need an answer.”
“I don’t have one yet.”
I wanted to break something. I wanted to cross the kitchen and pull her against me and replace his scent with mine until every wolf in the lodge knew who she came home to. Instead I gripped the edge of the counter and held still.
The kitchen door opened behind her.
Everett walked in looking better than he had any right to look.
The sickness that had been eating him for weeks had retreated overnight, and the difference showed in the color of his face and the way he carried himself.
His left arm was still strapped across his chest, his frame still too lean, his flannel still hanging loose on wasted shoulders.
But his eyes were clear. His skin had warmth in it.
He moved like a man who’d slept deeply, and I knew exactly whose nearness had given him that rest.
He saw me and stopped.
The kitchen was too small for two Alphas and the woman between them.
Every instinct I had screamed that this was a challenge, that Everett had taken something that belonged to me, that the correct response was violence.
I could feel his wolf reading the room the same way mine was.
Two predators in a confined space with overlapping claims.
“Coffee’s on the counter,” Liza said to him, her voice carefully level.
Everett didn’t move toward it. He looked at me, and whatever he saw in my face made him go very still.
“I can leave West Valley,” he said. “Today. Before this turns into something neither of us can take back.”
“Nobody’s leaving,” Liza said.
“Liza.” My voice came out rough and low, closer to a growl than I intended. “He’s offering.”
“And I’m telling you both.” She set her mug down and turned so she could see us at the same time.
The early light from the kitchen window lay along the scar.
She stood between us, and I hated that I couldn’t tell what came next.
“Nobody leaves this valley because you two can’t figure out how to be in the same room. ”
“This isn’t about a room,” I said.
“Then what is it about?”
I’d been holding back the answer since the night she first said she wanted to stay.
Since before that. Since the morning I’d handed her the keys to a lodge truck and watched her drive toward the resort without looking back, and my wolf had howled inside me because she was already the center of everything I had.
“Fate gave you two Alphas,” I said. “You know what I think that means. One of us loses. Two fated bonds, one marked choice already made, and somewhere in there, somebody ends up standing in a kitchen smelling the other man on you and pretending it doesn’t gut him.”
The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the fire in the common room.
Liza’s expression didn’t break, but something fierce and angry shifted in her, and the bond gave it away.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
“Am I?”
“You’re wrong, and you’re scared, and you’re turning it into a fight because that’s easier than facing it.”
She was right. I couldn’t stand there with his scent filling the kitchen, the wound in my side pulling every time I breathed, and the image of her leaving my cabin last night to sleep beside a man I had every reason to destroy.
I pushed off the counter and walked out. Everett’s steps followed me through the doorway.
The cold hit me on the lodge steps. It was early, and frost still covered the yard in a thin white crust that crunched under my boots.
I stripped at the door. Coat, flannel, boots, everything piled on the railing.
The air bit through the bandage around my ribs, and I could feel the wound beneath it protest, the skin tender and new where Kurt’s teeth had gone deepest. Everett stopped at the edge of the yard and came no farther.
I shifted.
The change hurt worse than usual. The wound made it savage.
The bandage tore as the muscle along my left side stretched and compressed into the wolf’s broader frame.
One strip stayed snagged beneath new fur, wet warmth spreading through it as a deeper tear reopened.
Pain lanced from my ribs to my hip, and I stumbled on four legs before my wolf’s balance caught me.
Then I was running.
The lodge yard fell behind me. The snowmobile garage, the guarded gate, the fence line, all of it blurred into white and timber and the dark shapes of pine as I hit the upper tour route and ran.
My paws punched through the frozen crust into softer snow beneath, and each stride pulled at the wound, and I didn’t care.
The pain was honest, and it made sense. It was clean in a way that the kitchen hadn’t been.
I ran until the lodge was a dark smudge below me and the resort’s upper lifts stood silent against a gray sky.
My breath came hard, and blood matted the fur along my left side, and the cold morning air carried nothing but pine and ice and the distant smell of diesel from the snowcat parked at the base.
Then I caught it.
Faint. Hours old. But unmistakable.
Sour sweat. Kurt Lamb.
My wolf locked onto the scent trail. Every other thought, Liza, Everett, the ache in my chest, went silent. Kurt’s smell ran along the upper tour route, recent enough that the overnight freeze hadn’t buried it. He’d come up here in the dark.
I followed the trail upslope through a stand of aspen where the snow was thinner and the bark showed claw marks from some animal. Past the marked boundary where Shane’s tours turned back. Past the first set of warning ropes that closed the route above the tree line.
The second warning rope had been cut.
Both halves hung from their post stakes, the fibers at the center sliced flat. Kurt or someone with him had carried a blade up this mountain and opened the route to the upper slope where the avalanche control equipment was cached.
Fresh tracks went up past the severed rope. Wolf prints, large, moving with purpose toward the equipment storage that sat higher on the face. The same face that had already slid once, and had filled in again with new snow since.
My wolf wanted to follow. Every hunting instinct I had said run the tracks up, find what he touched, pin him to the snow and end it. I knew this mountain, though, and what a loaded slope could do to one wolf moving alone above the tree line. That knowledge held me where I stood.
I bit through the cut rope where it met the left post stake and pulled it free. The taste of nylon and cold metal filled my mouth, and underneath it, Kurt’s scent clung to the fibers like a stain.
I carried it down the mountain in my teeth.
? ? ?
I shifted back in the snowmobile garage. My left side had stiffened during the run, and I knelt on the oil-stained concrete with a length of orange warning rope clenched in my fist. The torn remnant of my bandage sagged around my ribs, red through the middle.
Blood ran from beneath the ruined dressing, down the raised ridge of healing tissue, and dripped onto the floor.
Shane came around the front of a sled with a wrench in one hand and stopped.
“Jesus, Dom.”
I held up the rope. “Kurt’s scent. Hours old. Someone cut the upper warning line on the tour route last night. Tracks go up past it toward the avalanche cache.”
Shane took the rope from me. He turned it, looked at the end sliced cleanly by a blade, and his easy expression went flat and dangerous.
Liza appeared in the garage bay a moment later, still in her patrol layers. She took in the blood on the concrete, my bare torso, the reopened wound, and the rope in Shane’s hands, and her face went hard.
“How far up?” she asked.
“Past the second closure. The tracks keep going toward the cache, but the slope’s loaded and I didn’t follow.”
Through the open bay door, I saw Everett standing in the lodge yard. He was too far away to hear us, but close enough to see the rope in Shane’s hands. His nostrils flared. Even across that distance, he’d know Kurt’s scent.
Shane looked at me, then at the blood. “You ran the upper route with that wound?”
“I’ll live.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“It’s what I’m telling you.”
Liza took the rope from Shane and held the sliced end to the light. A knife had gone through taut nylon in one stroke. She set it down on Shane’s workbench beside a row of carbide-tipped tools and turned to me.
“Cabin,” she said. “Now.”
I didn’t argue.
? ? ?
The walk from the garage to the cabin, with a stop at the lodge railing for my clothes, took longer than it should have.
My left side had seized during the cool-down, and each step sent a dull, grinding ache through the muscle wall along my ribs.
Liza walked beside me without touching me, and I could feel through the bond that she was angry with me rather than Everett or the threat waiting above the cut line.
Inside, she sat me on the bed and went to the bathroom for the medical kit. I heard her running water, opening drawers, moving with the focus she brought to every rescue. When she came back, she had clean gauze, tape, and the antiseptic wash that stung like hell.
“Lie back,” she said.
I lay back. She peeled the dried blood away from the wound with dampened gauze, and I clenched my jaw and said nothing. The tear that had reopened ran about a hand’s width along the middle of the three scars, and fresh blood welled in the gap where the healing tissue had pulled apart.
“You shifted on this,” she said, and her voice was the flat, professional tone she used on the mountain when someone had done something stupid and she was deciding how much of her opinion to share.
“I did.”
“And ran.”
“Yes.”
She cleaned the wound with careful hands. The antiseptic burned, and I watched the ceiling beams and breathed.
“I sleep here,” she said.
I turned my head. She kept her eyes on the gauze in her hands, pressing it against the wound with the same attention she’d give a tourist’s broken leg.
“Your scent is on the sheets where I sleep. I walked into your kitchen this morning with Everett’s scent on my skin. Both of those things are true. And both of them are staying true.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You told me once that you stopped being reckless because the pack needed you standing.” She taped the fresh bandage in place, smoothing the edges with her thumbs. “You stopped risking yourself like this years ago. Running that route on a reopened wound could have put you down.”
“I found the rope.”
“Finding it doesn’t make the way you went up there safe. You were looking for something to fight. You said it yourself. One of us loses.” She sat back and looked at me, and the anger in her face had given way to something less guarded. “That isn’t how this works.”
“How does it work?”
She put her hand against my chest, above the heart and below the collarbone. Her skin was cool from the antiseptic, and the bond opened under her touch, filling the space between us with everything she couldn’t say in words yet.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But nobody loses. That’s the part I’m sure about.”
My fingers closed over hers, keeping her palm to my chest. Through the bond I felt her certainty, and beneath it the complicated tangle of what she carried for Shane and Everett and me, all of it fierce enough to keep her standing in a kitchen between two Alphas and telling them both to stay.
Outside, the morning had gone gray and still. Somewhere up the mountain, past the severed rope and the tracks that led toward the avalanche cache, Kurt had begun whatever he intended.
I kept Liza’s hand against my chest, and neither of us moved until duty pulled us back to the lodge.