Page 25 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

By Wednesday, I’ve got half a plan and a head full of a woman who hates me. I’m in the kitchen working a pan of chicken, since Mrs. Dunn’s gone home and Bella’s been promised a real dinner. Through the window I can see her out in the long garden, kicking a ball against the low stone wall, fair braids bouncing. She boots one wide, watches it skip off into the trees at the garden’s edge, and trots after it.

“Bella, dinner’s ready,” I call through the screen.

I plate the chicken and pour her milk. The silence runs a few seconds too long before it registers.

“Bell?”

Nothing answers. I look up from the counter, out the window, and the yard is empty. The ball’s not back. Neither is she.

I wipe my hands on a towel and step out onto the back porch. “Bella!”

The wind moves through the firs at the tree line. No small voice calls back.

A thin needle of unease slides into me. I come down off the porch, scanning the grass, the wall, the dark seam where the lawn gives way to forest. “Bella, this isn’t funny. Dinner’s getting cold.”

No answer comes. I pull her scent off the evening air, that warm scent of her I’ve known since the night I carried her out of a house I’ll never enter again. It threads across the garden into the trees, and I follow it, my pace quickening with every step. The wolf is up now, hackled, anxious, a growl gathering low in my chest that I don’t bother to swallow.

“Bella!” My voice dies among the trees.

The trail pulls me deeper than she should ever have gone, past the old swing, past the rotted log she’s forbidden to climb, far enough that the lights of the house have shrunk to a glow behind me. The animal claws at the inside of my ribs, frantic now, and I break into a run, branches whipping my arms.

I find her in a hollow between two firs. She’s crumpled on the leaf litter, one arm flung out, braids fanned across the dirt, and she isn’t moving.

“Bella.” I’m on my knees beside her, gathering her up, and her head lolls against my forearm. “Bell, wake up. Wake up for me.”

Her chest rises and falls. She’s breathing, shallow and slow, lashes still against her cheeks, and she won’t surface no matter how I say her name. I press two fingers to the pulse under her jaw. It flutters, much too weak.

“No, no, come on.” I cup her face and tap her cheek. “Open your eyes, baby, please.”

She won’t wake, and I don’t understand it. There’s no blood, no broken limb, no fall I can find. A healthy nine-year-old doesn’t drop in the woods behind her own house with her heart stuttering and weak.

I gather her to lift her, to run her to the car, to the healer, to anyone, and that’s when another smell reaches me.

It’s bitter, green, and it goes straight past my brain into the oldest part of me, the part that knows what it means.

I go still with my daughter in my arms.

A few feet from where she fell, half hidden under a fern, an open vial lies tipped on its side, a dark liquid still beading at the lip.

I don’t have to read a label. Every wolf alive is born knowing this scent, passed down from a time when it was the last thing too many of us ever smelled.

Wolfsbane.

My pulse roars. The shifters burned the sources to ash a hundred years ago. We hunted it across every territory and salted the ground where it grew, generations of us, until there was none left to find. There’s no wolfsbane left in the world. None has existed since long before my father drew breath.

And it’s here, twenty yards from my back door, with my daughter limp and cold against my chest.

Chapter Six

Jessa

I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and mutter into it, “I hate pickup lines.”

The line at Crestline Academy hasn’t moved in five minutes. I’ve nosed the new rental into the waiting zone with the engine off, the one the agency sent over while my poor dead Ford waits to get fixed. Now I’m doing what every other parent on this curb is doing: waiting and pretending not to mind. The junior bell hasn’t rung yet.

I lift my head. A few cars up, I catch sight of Rachel, the toddler propped on her hip and her older two trailing close as she steers them toward a battered hatchback.

She spots me through the windshield and lifts the baby’s hand in a little wave, then crosses the gap to my window. I roll it down.