The truck jolted to a stop.
Karl took his sweet time getting out and sliding his seat forward to allow Vivienne to unfold herself from the cramped backseat of the cab. She ignored his outstretched hand and jumped down, boots crunching on the crust of snow. Her father, Viggo, who'd already slammed the driver's-side door and lit a cigarette, wandered over to them.
"You make a run for it, and I'll drag you back here by your hair, girl." He growled. Vivienne's gaze, which had been trained on the old-growth white pine forest around them, flashed to meet its mirror in the cold blue of her father's eyes.
"I wasn't." She said stiffly. The time to run had come and gone. And come and gone. And come and gone. Over and over again since she was about nine years old when her mother had died of an overdose.
She's never taken it; always too afraid, too isolated, too sheltered, too caught in the web of excuses that was so tangled she didn't know which were hers and which were her pack's, or if it even mattered anymore because somehow, impossibly, the devil she knew still felt so much safer than the one she didn't.
So here she was, being shipped off to a pack she didn't know like so many other girls she'd grown up with. Like the handful who'd been conned into a match in her own dwindling pack in Sayer Springs and gotten stuck there.
"Good." Her father grunted. "Not gonna have you fucking this up for us. It's a damn fine deal."
One hundred acres of logging rights on their land, she knew. One hundred acres of logging rights in exchange for road-work contracts on a handful of highways that cut through Greyson Falls territory, which was twice the size of Sayer Springs.
Oh, and her, too.
A boon for both packs: jobs, income, a working relationship.
Oh, and the marriage, too. Right.
A branch snapped in announcement, and the three Sayer wolves looked up.
Nathanial Greyson moved with an ease that went deeper than confidence or capability. There was a certainty to his presence, a gravity that no man of thirty-five had any business possessing but he seemed to command in spades. His eyes were the same warm brown as the blackwater rivers that cut through their forests. They flicked over Karl and Viggo to settle on Vivienne, and despite her best intentions to be stubborn, to come into this with some semblance of will, she couldn't look away.
"Greyson." Viggo said, exhaling the younger man's name with a cloud of smoke and striding forward. "Sayer." Nate replied, releasing Vivienne from that brief hold of his gaze and clasping Viggo's hand.
"My second, Alfie Alriksson." Nate inclined his head to the man who flanked him, equally tall but a little leaner, with lighter brown hair and eyes and a smile that came wide and easy.
"Karl." Viggo jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Karl raised two fingers in greeting, still leaning against the truck next to Vivienne.
"And what you came for." He chuckled, which turned into a cough. "Vivienne."
She knew her father meant for her to step forward, but she kept her feet firmly rooted, fixing her gaze somewhere in the middle distance, having learnt her lesson about meeting Nate's gaze.
"Paperwork's all there." Viggo pressed on before Nate could speak again, pushing out a handful of disorganized papers. Alfie took them.
"She shouldn't give you much trouble, but if she gets stubborn or mouthy, a slap'll sort her out quick."
Vivienne watched Alfie's expression shift from generically pleasant to the briefest flash of disgust, to carefully masked neutrality. He leaned in toward Nate as her father turned, muttering something as Viggo barked at Karl: "Grab her shit."