Chapter Three: The Devil's Bargain

The Ironfang compound was a fortress of brick and chain-link an hour's ride from the line a dead factory district that no law-abiding soul came near, lit by sodium lamps and the red glow of the clubhouse sign. They gave me a room. Hot water. Dry clothes that weren't mine black, of course, everything here was black. I scrubbed the mud and the ceremony off my skin until it went raw, and I did not cry, because I had decided in the back of Cain's truck that I was done crying for people who watched me get thrown away. He was waiting when I came out. He'd shed the leather. Just a dark shirt now, sleeves shoved to the elbows, ink curling up both forearms, a glass of something amber in one ringed hand. He sat like the room belonged to him because it did. "You knew my name," I said. No greeting. "Before I told you. How?" "Sit, Wren." "How?" He looked at me over the rim of the glass, and for the first time the cruelty thinned into something I couldn't name. "Because I've been watching Crescent Hollow for three years," he said. "And because your rejection tonight wasn't an accident, little wolf. It was arranged." The floor seemed to drop. "What?" "Sit. Down." I sat. "Damien Hale didn't stumble into a chosen mate while his fated one stood waiting." Cain set the glass aside. "Celeste Vane was promised to him in a deal struck two years ago a deal worth more than your bond, more than your name, more than your life was ever going to be to him. The pregnancy sealed it. You were never going to be Luna, Wren. The bond just made the betrayal inconvenient enough that he had to do it in front of everyone, so no one could question the legality of it later." "You're lying." But I wasn't sure he was. That was the worst part. It fit too well the stillness in Celeste's hand, the way no one in the crowd looked surprised. Only me. I was the only one who hadn't known. "I don't lie," Cain said. "Lying is for men who are afraid of what the truth costs. I'm not afraid of anything." He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and the storm in his eyes pulled me in against every screaming instinct. "But I'll tell you what I do want. I want the man who made that deal to lose everything he traded you for. And to do that" his gaze dropped, slow, deliberate, to my mouth "I need you to stop being theirs. Completely." The air in the room changed. Thickened. My wolf, who should have cowered from him, stirred instead restless, hot, interested and I hated her for it. "Come here," he said softly. I should have refused. I knew exactly what kind of man he was. I crossed the room anyway. He drew me down onto his lap, one ringed hand spreading warm and certain at the small of my back, the other rising to my jaw the way it had in the mud. But there was nothing cold in it now. "They threw you away like you were nothing," he murmured against my throat, and I felt his mouth, his teeth, the graze of them sending fire straight down my spine. "Let me show you what mine feels like." His lips moved to the curve of my neck, his hand sliding up beneath the borrowed black shirt to skim the bare skin of my waist, my ribs, his thumb brushing the underside of my breast until my breath broke apart. He drew the shirt up and away, mouth following the path his hands had cleared, closing hot over my n*****s, his tongue circling, teasing, until I arched against him with a sound I didn't recognize as my own. "Cain" "I know." His voice was rough now, the control I'd seen all night fraying at the edges. His hand slid lower, beneath the waistband, fingers tracing the heat he found there until my hips moved without my permission. "You're soaked for me, little wolf. Did anyone in that pack ever make you feel like this?" "No," I gasped, because it was true, because Damien had never "They never will." His fingers slid against me, slow and merciless, and the room narrowed to his hand and his mouth and the storm of his eyes watching me come undone. I gripped his shoulders, his shirt, anything, as the heat coiled tight and hot and unbearable inside me. "Let go," he said, the same two words Damien's whole world had used to discard me, but in Cain's mouth they meant the opposite. "Let go, Wren. Give it to me." So I did. I shattered against his hand with his name on my lips, and he held me through every shaking second of it, his mouth at my ear murmuring things I'd remember for the rest of my life. When I could breathe again, he tipped my chin up that same gesture, the one that had started all of this in the rain. "Tomorrow," he said, "we begin taking Crescent Hollow apart." I nodded, dazed, wrecked, his. And that was when the clubhouse door slammed open, and Roan stood in the frame with blood on his knuckles and his scarred face grim. "Cain." He didn't even look at me. "We've got a problem. Hale's wolves are at the gate." His jaw tightened. "And they're not here for the girl." Cain went very still beneath me. "They're here for you."