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MADISON
“Come on, come on, come on,”I muttered to my car, patting the steering wheel as if that would help soothe her. The angry sounds she was making told me she wasn’t going to be any easier to calm down at the moment than I was.
I’d driven away from home like hell was on my heels an hour earlier. The sun had finished setting while I drove, and my little SUV’s heater had gotten weaker and weaker with every passing minute.
Now, I was fairly confident the vehicle was dying.
I wasn’t that attached to it, but I’d be in deep shit if I didn’t make it back home. Or to some place far, far away.
Because my wedding was tomorrow.
I wouldn’t be heartbroken if I missed it. I’d technically been running from my fiancé when I drove away in the first place.Colddidn’t even begin to describe the way my feet were feeling.
The marriage was arranged. My dad had promised me to the alpha of our skulk—an ugly word for a group of foxes, I know—before I was even born. As soon as the ultrasound showed that I had lady bits, I’d been engaged to the biggest asshole in the small neighborhood the skulk owned.
My dad had used the opportunity to buy himself a place in power, as the alpha’s second-hand man. Female kitsunes were basically nonexistent, other than me. There was only one other alive at the moment, and she was the alpha’s bitchy mother.
My car made a truly horrendous noise, and I groaned as smoke started coming from the engine.
It wasn’t even that old. Only like… thirteen years.
Basically new.
I knew I should probably pull over before something actually caught on fire, but at the moment, death by car explosion sounded a little better than going back home.
So, I kept driving.
A bunch of warning lights were on in the car, and something was beeping, but I ignored all of it.
What else was there to do? I’d headed straight into the mountains and was now an hour outside Cub Lake, the bear-shifter-owned town that the skulk lived on the outskirts of. Cub Lake had a nice grocery store, and foxes didn’t care about farming anywhere near enough to live any further than we already were from the food.
I did know someone with a house close to where I was—the middle of snowy, hellish nowhere—but there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d be contacting Ambrose Stevenson for help with anything. My older brother’s best friend was almost as big of abastard as the alpha I was engaged to, in an entirely different way.
Where the alpha was charismatic and manipulative, Bo was just an asshole.
I’d sooner run back to Cub Lake in the snow than come face to face with him again for the first time in five years.
…but that would mean marrying the alpha.
Both of my options were awful.
The smoke coming from my engine grew thicker the further I drove.
I was starting to wonder if my fiancé had paid a witch to enchant my car or something. Most witches were awful. I only knew of one that I liked, and she lived on a tropical resort full time, so it wasn’t like I could ask for her help on the regular. The snow-covered forest around me was hardly a luxury hotel on the beach.
We’d been having our coldest winter in multiple decades in Cub Lake. This deep in the mountains, it felt like I’d descended into an icy version of hell.
“You can do this,” I told my car, hoping like hell that a pep talk would work. It could probably sense my impending doom, though. Even if it wasn’t cursed.
The smoke got thicker, as if in response to my plea.
And darker.
Fuck.
The engine started sputtering.
