She looked at me like I was the only man in the room. The only thing in the room at all. And for her—for little Aurora with her mismatched eyes and trembling mouth—I suppose that I was.
Not so little anymore, I think. The Aurora that I saw today, after two years away, was a woman. Still small, still young, but filled out in all the right places.
Inside me, my wolf paces and howls, snarls and snaps. He’s furious, so furious that he barely feels like a part of me at all.His pain is overwhelming, and he’s making sure that it’s my pain too.
But I can’t show it to anyone. The pack needs to see that I’m strong, capable, and unaffected by what just happened. So I grit my teeth and clench my jaw, forcing myself to sit upright in the chair my father prepared for me, positioned on one side of the stage, where everyone can see me and judge me. He wants them all to look, he says—to look at their future alpha and weigh him as either worthy or unworthy.
After the speech is over, some of the warriors raise concerns, which either the elders or my father, often both, answer. I’m not expected to answer any question or be called on at all, which is a blessing, since the pain in my chest is so excruciating that my entire back has stuck to the chair from sweat. I barely hear it as the meeting is called to a close—I only see it as my father walks off stage and heads toward the office he keeps in the back of the Great Hall, on the other side of the amphitheater.
As I get up, I have to hide how much it hurts me. Don’t flinch, don’t whine or whimper, don’t stumble or limp. When you’re the alpha’s son, you get certain messages from the time you’re young. In my case, my father made sure I knew one thing, and one thing above all else: weakness is not allowed.
If I skinned my knee, I was meant to silently bear it until my shifter healing kicked in. When I broke an arm, he reset it himself, insisting I was old enough that it should heal fine. And after he found me crying over my first breakup, he hit me with a switch until I could take a lashing without shedding a tear.
This pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt before in my life. It feels as if I’m bleeding out, but there are no open wounds. My chest aches so deeply that my skin feels cold and numb. My wolf is still stirred up, even almost two hours after it all went down, and my head pounds in time with my pulse.
Giving the elders a brief nod of acknowledgement as I head backstage, I take the hallway toward Cade’s study as fast as I can. My entire body feels like it’s on fire now, and I’m both hot and cold at the same time. The pain makes me feel weak, as if there’s something wrong with me, because surely my father wouldn’t have insisted I do it this way if he knew it would feel so awful.
“Dad…” I knock on the open door, then push it open, finding him sitting at his desk with a glass in one hand and an open bottle of whiskey in the other. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
His eyes flick up to me, and based on the hardness in their steel gray depths, my stomach sinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I know that look. This won’t end well for me. My wolf whines, and sick dread pools in my stomach.
“Just had to speak up, didn’t you?” Rising from his chair, he stalks up to me and yanks me into the room by my wrist. I stumble at his strength, just like I’m still the little kid he pushed around. “Close that door and face your maker, boy. You’re going to pay for what you did.”
Stoically, I push the door shut behind me and let all thoughts of having a calm discussion about this leave me. I know what it means when he’s like this. I was hoping that since the meeting went well, and he seemed so happy and invigorated on stage, that he’d be in a good mood. But like so many other times, I was wrong.
“You never should’ve spoken up on stage.” He shoves me into the overstuffed armchair opposite his desk and looms over me. “It was for me to decide whether or not that misfit got to stay in the pack. Not for you. But you just had to open your mouth and speak anyway, didn’t you? I thought you learned something from those other alphas in the past two years, boy.”
“I learned a lot.” I can’t stop myself from pointing out, “Like that it makes an alpha look weak to exile someone so defenseless.”
He backhands me so hard that my head hits the headrest. Pain radiates from my cheek, and as I raise my fingers to it, I realize with a sense of sick dread that he cut me with his ring.
Turning my head to look at him, I take in the sneering curl of his lips, the glint of his wolfsbane ring from the overhead. It’ll give me a permanent scar, one I realize by probing with my fingers will stretch from my jaw to just under my eye.
My father came perilously close to half-blinding me just now.
Snarling, the wolf in me rises up, insisting we could tear his throat out. We could, I have no doubt of it, but there’s no telling what would come after. And based on the look on his face, he’s more than capable of fighting back. He might even welcome it if I took the first step.
With a sick sense of dread, I realize that I made a mistake today. I should’ve allowed Cade to publicly exile Aurora, instead of stepping in to suggest she stay part of the pack. Maybe if I’d let him take his anger out on her in a harmless way, she could’ve struck out on her own and found allies and protectors among the exiled shifters of society. Or even found another pack to take her in.
But I just had to keep her close to me. My stomach churns at the realization that I’ve doomed her just as much as I’ve doomed myself. My wolf paces back and forth, anxious and on edge, desperate to go to her and protect her.
“It’ll fade, won’t it?” Looking up at my father, I try to find some knowledge or wisdom in his glassy, angry eyes. “The mate bond. It won’t hurt this way forever?”
He snorts. “How should I know? Your mother and I were meant to be. The second I saw her, the bond snapped into place,and it was like…” Closing his eyes, he inhales deeply, his face settling into something like happiness. “Heaven.”
Then his eyes snap open, and he’s looking at me again. “Until you came along and killed her.”
There’s nothing I can say to that. Thankfully, my father grabs his bottle of whiskey and strides out of the study, no doubt heading out to finish it off, maybe with a side of witch’s brew to really make the liquor stick around. His beta and warriors will stick close by, just in case he gets into trouble, to make sure nothing happens—and no one else in the pack sees.
He’s not like this often, I reason as I dab the blood from my cheek, wincing at the sting of wolfsbane kicking in. It’s been a few months since I even saw him with a drink in his hand. It must be the pressure of the Lunar New Year getting to him.
That, and the sight of his son and heir being bonded to the weakest shifter in the pack. The outcast who can’t even shift. Who carries a madness with her that infected her whole pack and killed every last member but her.
I know that he’ll target her now. So I vow to myself that I’ll protect her as much as possible, even if it means suffering from this ache in my chest from the rejected bond. Better to have this, then to find out what my father would do to her if she became the next alpha’s mate. Nothing good could come from his rage in the face of her weakness.
My wolf whines and snarls. He wants her—desperately. I don’t know how to tell him that he’ll never get to have her. So instead I just slump down into the armchair, pressing on my bleeding cheek in the hopes it’ll stop bleeding soon, and let him howl out his anguish and despair.
Better that I suffer like this, so she can be safe, somewhere far from here.
