The Packless Mate

Chapter One: The Faultline

The Faultline sat where three territories bled into each other, and it had the scars to prove it.

Ayla Marsten stood at the end of the bar with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door, which was where she had stood four nights a week for the last three years. The building was a converted logging office with a tin roof that amplified rain into a constant hiss, and tonight the rain was doing its best. Woodsmoke, spilled whiskey, wet flannel, sixty different pack scents layered over each other like paint on an old barn. Neutral ground. The only piece of the Cascades where a Pinegrove wolf could drink next to a Silverlake wolf without one of them ending up in a shallow grave.

Mostly.

"Corner table," said Hollis, the bar's owner, without looking up from the glass he was drying. Human. Sixty-something. Had a shotgun under the bar that he'd never once needed to reach for, because he had Ayla instead. "The kid with the neck tattoo keeps looking at the Ridgeback boys."

"I know."

"You gonna do something about it?"

"I'm doing it now."

Hollis snorted. "Standing there counting."

"Breathing," Ayla said. "They're breathing faster. Two more minutes and the kid stands up."

She knew because she could hear it. That was the thing about the Marsten line — everybody focused on the fighting, the reflexes, the reputation, but the ugly truth of it was mostly hearing. Heartbeats. Breath. The scrape of a chair leg before it happened. Her mother used to say the fight starts thirty seconds before the fist does, and you can win it in those thirty seconds if you're paying attention.

The kid with the neck tattoo stood up at ninety seconds. Ayla was already moving.

She crossed the room without hurrying, put one hand flat on his chest, and walked him backward into his chair with a gentleness that had nothing gentle underneath it. He was maybe nineteen, wiry, wearing a Riverjaw crest patched onto his jacket like a dare.

"Sit," she said.

"They said—"

"I don't care what they said. This is the Faultline. Everybody bleeds outside." She held his gaze until his eyes dropped, which took four seconds, which meant he'd been raised right and was just drunk and stupid, not actually a problem. "Hollis will send you a beer on the house. Drink it slowly. Go home."

She felt her wolf stir under her skin as she walked back, disappointed. That was the part nobody warned you about, being packless. It wasn't loneliness. Loneliness she could have handled. It was that her wolf had nothing to hold on to, no bonds humming in the background like the sound of a house with people in it, and so it turned inward and gnawed. Three years of that. Three years of sleeping four hours a night, of cuts that took eight days to close when they should have taken three, of her wolf pacing at the edge of every conversation looking for a reason to come out.

She was fraying. She knew the word for it. Packless wolves went one of three ways: they found a new pack, they went feral, or they went into the woods one autumn and didn't come back out. Ayla had decided a while ago that she preferred the third option to the second, which she supposed was a kind of plan.

"You want a drink?" Hollis asked.

"I want the rain to stop."

"Then you moved to the wrong mountains."

The door opened at 10:40 and the entire bar changed temperature.

Ayla felt it before she saw it — the pressure of an Alpha crossing a threshold, the way the air seemed to get thicker and heavier, like standing under a stormfront. Every wolf in the room turned. Conversations died in the middle of words. A Riverjaw woman near the stove actually stood up and moved away from the door.

Alden Lockhart came in shaking water off his coat like he owned the roof it had fallen from.

He was a big man in a way that had nothing to do with height. Broad through the chest and shoulders, silver coming in at his temples, a face that had probably been handsome twenty years ago and had since settled into something coarser. He wore a wool coat over a collared shirt, which was Pinegrove's whole idea of itself: we're not animals, we're landowners.

Six enforcers came in behind him. They fanned out along the wall without being told to, which told Ayla everything she needed to know about how often they did this.

Hollis's hand drifted under the bar.

"Don't," Ayla said quietly. "Not for this."

Alden crossed the room to her. He took his time about it. He stopped an arm's length away, close enough that she could smell his cologne over the wet wool, and looked at her the way a man looks at a truck he's thinking about buying.

"Ayla Marsten," he said. "You're taller than the stories."

"You're not."

One of the enforcers made a noise. Alden raised two fingers and the noise stopped.

"I've been meaning to come see you for a long time," he said. "Do you know that I tried to buy you? Four years ago. I made your old Alpha an offer for your transfer. Cash, hunting rights, two acres of riverfront. He turned me down." He smiled. "Then he banished you a year later. Which I found hilarious."

"Is there a point coming, or is this the whole visit?"

He reached inside his coat.

She was fast enough to break his wrist before the hand came out. She thought about it. She could feel the calculation running in her spine — six enforcers, a human behind the bar, twenty civilians, no exit that didn't go through people. Her wolf said *do it anyway*, which was how she knew not to.

What came out of the coat was a photograph.

Alden laid it on the bar, face up, and slid it toward her with two fingers the way you'd move a chess piece.

Ayla looked at it.

The world went very small and very quiet, the whole roaring bar collapsing down into four inches of glossy paper.

Rory. Her brother. Her big brother, who used to carry her on his shoulders through the Silverlake orchards, who taught her to skin a deer and to throw a punch and to lie to their mother convincingly. He was on a concrete floor with his wrists chained above him to a pipe. His face was swollen so badly his left eye had disappeared. His shirt was gone. His ribs were a map of colors.

He was looking at the camera. That was the worst part. He was looking right at it, and even through the swelling she could read the expression, because she'd known it her whole life. Rory was furious.

"Six weeks ago," Alden said pleasantly, "he came across my southern boundary. Alone, at night, without leave. I asked him why. He said he needed to reach his sister." He tapped the photo. "I have him in a place you will not find. He's fed. Mostly. My people get bored, and I have not been aggressive about correcting that."

Ayla's hands were flat on the bar. She kept them there because she did not trust them anywhere else. She could hear her own pulse in her ears, a hard slow drumbeat, and under it her wolf rising up out of the dark like something surfacing in a lake.

"What do you want." It didn't come out as a question. It came out flat and low, barely human.

"You." Alden leaned a hip against the bar, comfortable. "I want you to mate me. Publicly. Full ceremony, witnessed by every Alpha in the region, with your Marsten bloodline on display where everyone can count it." He spread his hands. "That's all. Say yes and your brother walks out of my territory on his own two legs, and I'll even have him driven to whatever hole you want him left in."

"Why."

"Because I'm forty-nine years old and my last mate gave me two daughters who couldn't hold a border against a house cat, and because the name Marsten still makes old wolves go quiet in a room." He said it lightly. It was not light. "Your grandfather killed three Alphas. Your mother broke the Riverjaw line at the Kettle. I want that in my house and I want it in my children."

Ayla lifted her eyes from the photograph.

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'll send you pieces of him," Alden said, "until you say yes. I'd rather not. It's crude, and I'm not a crude man. But you should understand that it's not a bluff and it's not the worst thing I've done."

Hollis had gone very still behind the bar. Somebody in the corner was crying, quietly, one of the young ones who'd never felt an Alpha turn nasty in a small room.

"How long do I have," Ayla said.

"Two weeks. Full moon after next." Alden pushed off the bar and buttoned his coat. "Come to my gate. Or don't, and we'll do this the ugly way. Honestly, Marsten, you should be flattered. I'm offering you a pack." He let that land. He knew exactly what he was doing when he let it land. "You look terrible, by the way. How long have you been out here? Three years? Your eyes have that packless shine. You'll be feral inside of eighteen months and everyone in this room knows it."

He walked out. His enforcers peeled off the wall and followed him.

The door shut. The rain hissed on the tin.

Nobody in the Faultline said a word.

Ayla picked up the photograph. Her hand was steady, which surprised her. She folded it once, carefully, along a line that missed her brother's face, and put it in her jacket pocket.

"Ayla," Hollis said.

"I need the rest of the week off."

"Take it. Take the month." He set a glass down and filled it two fingers deep and pushed it toward her, and when she didn't move he said, "Sit down for one minute. One. Then you can go do whatever's already happening behind your eyes."

She sat. She drank the whiskey. It didn't help, but it gave her sixty seconds, and she used them.

Facts. She lined them up the way her mother had taught her.

One: Alden Lockhart had forty fighters and a stone-walled compound and the fifth-largest pack in the Cascades.

Two: she was one wolf, alone, with a knife in her boot and eleven hundred dollars in a coffee can.

Three: no lone wolf in the history of the mountains had ever taken anything from an Alpha. Not once. The law didn't recognize her. She couldn't demand a challenge, couldn't call a council, couldn't even file a grievance with the regional Alphas' assembly because grievances required a pack seal.

Four: therefore she needed a pack. Not to join. To *use*. Something with teeth and territory, something that could stand across a border from Alden Lockhart and not blink.

Five: every large pack in the region was either allied to Pinegrove, terrified of it, or too far away.

Except one.

Ayla set the glass down.

"Hollis. What do you know about Blackmere?"

Hollis's eyebrows went up so fast it was almost funny. "Nolan Blackmere?"

"Blackridge pack."

"I know he comes in here maybe twice a year and I raise my prices when he does, because he tips like a lunatic and his people break furniture." Hollis rubbed the back of his neck. "I know he took Blackridge off his uncle at twenty-four by tearing the man's jaw off in front of the whole pack. I know he's got sixty wolves that would walk into a fire for him and no allies whatsoever because he thinks alliances are for people who lose. I know he's spent two years grinding his teeth about Lockhart pushing his eastern line." He looked at her. "And I know a woman alone should not drive up that mountain."

"Good," Ayla said, and stood. "That's the one."