My Three Alpha Bullies Discovered I Was Their Mate

I am the only wolf in this valley who cannot shift.

Two hundred and nineteen people go into those trees on a full moon. I stand at the edge with a lamp I never light and count them out, and count them back in, and go home.

For seven years, three boys made that worse. Severin Marsh, who never once raised his voice and arranged every room so I sat in the draught. Teague Rook, who used his hands. Caspian Vale, who stood ten feet to the side and watched and wrote down every single thing he did not stop.

Heirs of the three packs. The best thing that ever happened to this valley.

Then the bond surfaced in front of two hundred people, and all three of them went down on one knee on a stone floor, and the whole valley saw it.

And nothing happened.

Because I already refused it. I worked out who they were when I was fourteen, in a record house, off a wall of old bonds, and I walked a mile and a half through snow in a coat over a nightdress and signed a thing that cannot be undone.

The price of that document is taken out of the wolf who signs it.

It took mine. It did not stop them. They had six and a half more years of me, and all it bought them was a better name to call me.

Now three packs want that shelf opened. My own mother has been defending a lie about me in shops since I was a girl. And three men keep walking up my lane with nothing pulling them there at all.

There is no cure. There is no undoing. There is nothing owed.

Which means everything from here has to be chosen.

And nobody has ever asked me what I want.