Her Second-Chance Alpha

My mate rejects me from the top of the stairs, with the whole pack watching me walk to him.

"I, Declan Royce, Alpha of Greywater, reject you, Maeve Carrick, as my mate and as anything to me."

Something goes in the middle of me, like a cable cut. And forty-one stones, from the north gate all the way round the valley and back, turn their heads to look at me. I feel every one of them. I always have. Nobody in this hall knows that.

I'm halfway up the aisle. Three hundred wolves on either side of me, in their good coats. My dead mother's dress, let out at the hem because I'm taller than she was. Twenty-two steps to go. I count things. It's what I'm for.

And beside him, at the top, in white, is Brynn Sutter.

She's already there. She was there when I came in. I thought she was standing with the elders.

Her father steps forward. Garrett Sutter, Beta of Greywater since the merger, hat in his hand like a man at a funeral he's pleased about.

"Tonight's a union after all," he says to the hall. "The Alpha takes Brynn as his chosen mate, and the Sutter land comes in with her. Thirty wolves. The north valley." A pause for the applause. It comes. "Nothing changes for the rest of you. The border holds. It's Royce blood. Always has been."

Somewhere behind me, a woman says, "Oh, the fence girl," the way you'd say oh, the dog.

That's me. Forty miles of wire, gates and trail cams. Lowest rank in the house that isn't holding a mop. The stones are still looking. They've never done that before.

"Maeve." Declan, from the top of the stairs. Reasonable voice. The one he uses on ranchers. "Let's keep this clean. You're past the north stone by dawn. Take what you can carry."

Everyone waits for me to cry. Brynn's practised her sad face. It's good.

"How long has she been standing there?" I ask.

"Maeve."

"No, I'm curious. Did she go up before me, or did you have her hiding behind the elders?"

Somebody laughs. Not at me, for once.

I turn around. Forty steps to the door. I count them, because my knees have stopped reporting in. Thirty-nine more than he expected.

The snow takes me at the bottom of the porch steps.

Not a faint. Everything just stops holding. I'm on my hands in a foot of powder, and my mother's dress is soaking through, and the thing he cut is bleeding somewhere there isn't a bandage for.

Boots stop beside me. Big ones.

I know who it is before I look up, because he's the only guest tonight who didn't clap. Rohan Virk. Alpha of Caldera, across the north ridge. The pack with no border and forty wolves who don't need one. Declan invited him so he'd see how big we'd got.

His eyes are the wrong colour in the dark. Silver, with blue in it.

He doesn't offer a hand. He'd be wrong to.

"Breathe through it," he says. "It stops. Then walk."

Six words. Then his truck, and the snow eating the sound of it.

I breathe through it. He's right. It stops.

Declan drives me to the north gate himself. That's the kind of man he is. Cleans up.

"You can have the cloak," he says. "Garrett's clearing the rest of your room tonight."

"My mother's book is in that room."

"Then he'll box it."

The heater ticks. The road's plowed as far as Dot's gatehouse and no further, same as every January of my life.

"Can I ask you something, Alpha?"

"Don't call me that like it's a joke."

"Who walks your line, Declan?"

He looks at me like I've asked who turns the moon on. "Nobody walks it. It's blood. My grandfather's, my father's, mine. The border holds because a Royce is standing in the valley."

"Right."

"A fence girl doesn't change that. A fence girl checks the wire."

"Every full moon," I say. "All forty-one stones. Nine years. You never asked why."

"Because I don't care about fences." He says it kindly. That's the worst part. "Rogues haven't crossed into Greywater in eighty years. That's not wire."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

Dot comes out of the gatehouse in her check jacket with the keys on their cord.

Seventy-one, forty years on this gate, and she looks at Declan the way you'd look at a dog that's been sick on the rug.

"Alpha."

"Dot. Open it, please. She's leaving."

Dot opens it. The north stone sits in the headlights, waist high, grey, with my mark on it from last month, if you knew where to look. Nobody does.

Declan's already texting. Brynn, probably. Done, it'll say.

"Dawn," he tells me, and reverses out, and he's gone before I've crossed.

"Well," Dot says. "Go on, then. Before you lose your nerve."

"I don't have one."

I step over the line.

Nothing. A second of absolute nothing.

Then the hum that has been under my feet since I was nineteen goes out of the north stone like a light switched off. Then stone two. Then three. I feel it go round the valley, stone after stone, the way streetlights die down a road, one after the next.

Forty-one.

Three hundred wolves asleep in their good coats, and no border.

"He didn't ask," Dot says. "Did he."

"He told me it was Royce blood."

Dot makes a sound that might be a laugh. "What do I say when he works it out?"

"Tell him the truth." I pull my mother's cloak tight. "He just threw his border out with the fence girl."