"Not all of it was a lie."
The mark on my throat still pulsed with his heartbeat. That was the cruelty of the bond I'd just chosen I could feel him now, under the words, and what I felt was not a man bracing to deceive me.
It was a man bracing to be hated.
"Then tell me the part that was true," I said. "All of it. Or I'll spend the rest of this bond wondering, and a wondering wife is no use to you."
Something flinched in him at wife. Good. Let it.
Cain crossed to the cabinet behind the bar and pulled out a steel box, the kind built to survive a fire. He set it between us and didn't open it.
"I was nineteen," he said. "Your father was the only pack wolf who ever treated a rogue's son like he had a soul. He found the ledger the deal the Hale line made, the one that would have ended the
