⎯⎯ ୨ One ୧ ⎯⎯
1 | R E A C H E R
I buckled my leather boots and growled at nothing. My house was too quiet, just the way I liked it. It sat far away from the rest of the pack, high on a jagged cliff, where the wind never stopped screaming against the stone and no one bothered to climb up just to talk to me. I didn’t want neighbors. I didn’t want friends. And I definitely didn’t want a mate.
I caught my reflection in the dark window glass. Thick, messy black hair that I never bothered to comb. A rough beard I kept short only because Lazarus complained it made me look feral in pack meetings. And the scar, that long, ugly line running through my left eye, a permanent reminder of a fight I barely remembered starting and definitely remembered finishing. I looked like the monster everyone said I was. I’d stopped minding a long time ago. It was easier to be the thing people feared than the thing people expected something from.
“Alpha? We are ready to move out.”
I turned. My Beta, Lazarus, was standing at the door, filling most of the frame. He was a big man, thick through the shoulders, built like he’d been carved out of the same mountain rock as the rest of us. But even he looked small standing next to me. My pack, the Storm Ridge, was known for having the largest, most ruthless wolves in the land. We weren’t known for being nice. We weren’t known for being warm. We were known for winning, and for making sure nobody forgot it.
“Why am I going to this?” I snapped. My voice was deep and gravelly, the kind of voice that made men flinch before I’d even finished the sentence. “It’s a waste of time.”
“It’s a Mating Ceremony, Reacher,” Lazarus said, sighing the way he always sighed when he was about to say something he knew I didn’t want to hear. “The Meadow Pack. Their women are... special. They say they are the most beautiful in the world. Even if you don’t care, your men do. They need a leader to guide them there.”
I grabbed my heavy coat off the hook by the door, the leather stiff and cold from the mountain air. “They’re just women in white sheets. I don’t believe in the sacred beauty junk. I’m only going so you lot don’t start a war while you’re looking for wives.”
I walked past him, my boots thumping loudly on the wooden floor, each step echoing through a house that had never once heard a woman’s laughter or a child’s footsteps. I had tattoos crawling up my arms and across my chest, marks of every fight I’d won and every person I’d scared away, a map of a life spent building walls instead of homes. I was thirty years old, and I was rude to anyone who breathed near me. It kept things simple. It kept people at a distance where they couldn’t disappoint me, and where I couldn’t disappoint them either.
The Moon Goddess didn’t give mates to men like me. I was cursed. I had treated the world badly, and the world gave me nothing back. That was the deal I’d made with myself years ago, somewhere between my father’s death and my first kill, and I’d never seen a reason to renegotiate it.
Down in the valley, my men were waiting, restless as hounds before a hunt. They were shouting, laughing, shifting their weight from foot to foot like the ground itself couldn’t hold their excitement. They were young, most of them, young enough to still believe the moon owed them something good. They were excited to see the veiled flowers of the Meadow Pack, excited for a kind of hope I’d stopped carrying a long time ago.
“Listen up!” I roared. The woods went silent instantly, birds and all. Even the wind seemed to hold itself still. “We go in, we see if the moon has a match for you, and we leave. No fighting. No stealing. If you find a mate, she comes back with us. If you don’t, you keep your mouths shut.”
A few of the younger warriors exchanged glances, but nobody argued. Nobody ever argued with me. That was another thing about being the monster, it made obedience easy and connection impossible, and most days I told myself that was a fair trade.
I shifted into my wolf. My bones cracked and grew until a massive, black wolf stood where the man had been, my paws sinking slightly into the frost hardened dirt. I was twice the size of a normal wolf, built heavier and darker than anything that ran these mountains, and even among my own men, a few still took an instinctive step back when I finished the change.
I didn’t care about beauty. I didn’t care about love. Those were words for men who still believed the world was fair. I just wanted to get this over with so I could go back to my lonely house and my lonely life, back to the silence that had never once asked anything of me and had never once let me down.
My wolf stirred restlessly beneath my skin, pacing at the edges of my mind the way he always did before a run, though there was something different in it this time, some low hum of anticipation I didn’t have a name for and didn’t bother looking for one. I shoved the feeling down, the way I shoved down everything that didn’t serve a purpose. Sentiment was a luxury for men who hadn’t buried as many people as I had.
Lazarus fell into step beside me as we crested the first ridge, his wolf form nearly as broad as mine but nowhere near as dark. He let out a low huff, almost a laugh, and I ignored it. He knew better than most that pushing me before a run never ended well for him.
Behind us, the pack spread out in a loose formation, young wolves nipping at each other’s heels, older warriors keeping a steady, disciplined pace. I could smell the excitement rolling off them in waves, sharp and bright, nothing like the cold, flat scent I carried. I told myself it didn’t bother me. I told myself a lot of things.
I let out a short, sharp bark and started the long run toward the Meadow Pack, my men falling in behind me, the sound of a dozen paws hitting frozen earth the only music either of us had ever needed.
