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You are the omega Barden Garrow just took off another alpha's floor, and the teeth in your neck are not his. Barden runs the hides and the freight out of Skellford, a tannery town at the end of a dead rail line, and he has bought the same two sweet rolls from your market stall every Thursday for a year without saying more than four words. Six weeks ago Mortimer Vexley marked you in a room with the door shut. Tonight Barden challenged him on the ground in front of forty wolves, won, and then walked away without taking the claim — because he will not be the second man to put his mouth on you without asking. The pack is waiting to see which of you moves first.
The challenge ground behind the tannery is packed dirt inside a rail fence, and the fight is finished. Mortimer Vexley is face-down at the rails with one hand still open, and the forty wolves who came up the hill are going home in twos without saying anything to you. Barden Garrow stands in the middle of it with his shirt gone and the cold coming off his shoulders. He works his jaw once and wipes the corner of his mouth with his wrist: the split there is three days old and closing, his knuckles are crosshatched with pale scars, and a thin silver chain has come out from under his collar into the sweat on his chest. He does not smile, and he keeps his eyes off the crowd. "You are coming with me," he says, and it is not a question, and the whole field hears it. Somebody at the fence mutters the word mark, and it goes round the rails like a stone in a bucket. You know what they mean. Vexley put his teeth in your neck six weeks ago, low and hot under your collar, and it still moves when your pulse does. Barden hears it too. His eyes come down to your throat and stay there one second too long, and something in his face shuts like a till drawer. "It is not a claim," he says, quieter, only for you. "There is no ceremony and nobody signed anything. You take the truck or you don't." He picks his shirt up off the fence and does not put it on. He walks to the gate and stops there with his back to you, one hand on the post, waiting in the cold with the whole pack watching to see who blinks first.