Page 71 of The Alpha’s Midnight Witch

Two houses down, an inflatable spider deflates slowly, like it's giving up.

Her plastic skeleton stands where she staked it. Six feet of grinning nothing.

At one in the morning, its head turns and looks at me.

"Don't even think about it," I say.

It keeps looking.

Frost comes in around two. It creeps up the boards, over the toes of my boots, and stops in a clean line four inches from where I'm sitting, because I run hot enough that it can't get closer.

All I can think about is what happened earlier. I can’t get her out of my head. I want her so bad and I just want to go to her and claim her but that will have to wait.

My burned palms ache in the cold. Good.

Sid arrives out of nowhere, the way he does. He walks the length of the rail, drops onto the step above mine, and settles against my back like a bag of warm sand.

"She talking to you?"

He puts his chin on my shoulder.

"Yeah. Me neither."

Here's the thing I don't like to think about.

I know exactly what a mate bond looks like when only one person chooses it.

My father claimed his the week his wolf picked my mother. Didn't ask. Didn't explain. He drove out to her town and came home with her, and he told the pack it was the strongest bond in three generations, and he was proud of it the way other men are proud of a house they built.

She stayed thirty-three years.

I remember her at the kitchen window every morning with a cup she never drank from, looking down the road like she was waiting on a bus that had already come and gone. She was always so sad and lonely and depressed. It’s like she couldn’t let herself ever drink that coffee or she would be stuck there forever.

That's love, he told me. That's what it costs them. They get used to it.

But, they don’t get used to it. They should have a choice in choosing a mate.

Not the same, my wolf says.

It's the same scenario.

You would never.

I'm sitting outside a woman's house at three in the morning because I can't make myself go home. My wolf has called her ours since April. And nine days out from Halloween there's a mirror writing her a sentence about who she belongs to, and not one word of it is a lie.

So don't tell me it’s not the same.

Her kitchen light comes on at three forty.

She isn't sleeping either. The tap runs. A chair scrapes. The cupboard that sticks opens and bangs, and I could fix it in four minutes with a chisel, and she's never once asked me to touch it.

I sit in the cold and let myself imagine the worst.

She'll hire someone so she's never alone in a room with me. Evelyn will move her behind Lantern walls where I'm a guest with an appointment. Maren will learn to say my name the way you say a neighbor's name.

And my wolf will spend the rest of our life at a window being depressed.

Stop.