Page 1 of Dutiful Wolf's Mail Order Mate

CHAPTER ONE

RAFE

“You can’t!”

The screen door slammed hard enough to bounce back and swing shut again, but that wasn’t enough. Not for Elise. She had to push and fight every step of the way.

I didn’t turn as her steps hurried after me. “It’s done. No use complaining.”

Her footsteps stomped across the yard, each heavy footfall another jab at my competence. I didn’t need to turn to picture the fury etched across Elise’s features. The deep anger she carried acted like sonar pinging and seeking where to launch her next attack.

Nine times out of ten, she found me.

All hail the king.

“A mail-order bride, Rafe? You fucking bought a bride like a fleshlight off the internet?” she snapped, closing the distance between us.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Orion and Tara lingering near the corner of the house. Fucking wonderful. Elise’s voice carried with it the kind of indignant heat that tended to attract an audience, even in our dwindling pack.

Ignoring the cowards and snoops, I spun and faced Elise head-on. My wolf snarled for control and fought to put her in her place. She was a danger, he seemed to growl. A threat to the stability of the pack.

A challenge to face and destroy.

I kept my voice steady, a calm surface hiding the roiling unease churning in my gut. “I’m doing what was asked of me when I took alpha.”

Her eyes narrowed, jaw tensing. She opened her mouth to go another round, but I pressed on before the first syllable left her lips.

“Look around you.” I swept my arm out, gesturing to the expanse of the ramshackle pack house and overgrown yard, the empty homes peeking between the trees. “This place is circling the drain. We’re down to the four of us since?—”

I cut myself off before I threw the words at her feet. Of the entire, minuscule pack left, she didn’t need the reminder of tearing out her father’s throat.

A necessity. That bastard would have watched us slaughtered and happily rolled in the blood if it meant he took out as many Crescent Hollow wolves as died with him.

By rights, alpha should have passed to Elise. She dealt the killing blow. She had the lineage and support. Instead, she turned to an upstart enforcer who only found promotion to second-in-command through an untimely death.

Another of her father’s victims we were all too fucking blind to see.

We were barely keeping our heads above water in the aftermath. That Declan and the Hollow wolves didn’t murder the survivors in our sleep was a miracle. The olive branch of an alliance stood strong, but I had to rely more and more on their second, Corbin. Who knew how long until that branch completely snapped.

The one bright spot in the shit-colored fingerpainting was our lack of numbers. Fewer wolves to call my own meant fewer deaths to guilt me in whatever hell would serve as my afterlife.

After Marcus’s death, after I took control of the pack, my wolves came to me in a trickle, then a flood. Cousins never before mentioned had open spots in their packs. Dying relatives needed caregiving. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities sprang up weekly.

A vicious, cruel alpha wouldn’t have let them leave. He would have looked at the strength of Crescent Hollow, at the bears building a clan on our border, and kept the best fighters sniffing for a potential fight.

I released them without argument.

Rafe Rutherford, the alpha to none.

Elise had opened her mouth again, but I silenced her with a raised hand. “It’s done,” I repeated. “She’s coming. She’s due any moment, so pray the potholes got them if you need a few extra minutes to collect yourself.”

Everything had slowly fallen apart in the span of two years. The weight of responsibility breathed down my neck every second of every day. My duty was to our fractured pack, but I was grasping at straws to secure our future.

They needed something to rally behind and hold them together.

Something like an alpha’s mate and an heir to protect.

My wolf prowled restlessly under my skin in a demand for that stability.

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