The Alpha I Shouldn't Want

Chapter Eleven — Soren

° VALERIAN'S POV °

She shifted slightly in her sleep, murmuring something too soft to make out, one hand curling loosely against the pillow beside her face. I stood in the doorway and did not move closer. I did not trust myself to move closer. I had already proven tonight, in the entrance hall, with my hand locked around her wrist and my voice raised in a fury that had nothing to do with wet pants and everything to do with the mate bond clawing beneath my ribs, that my control around her had grown thinner than I wanted to admit.

She was twenty-three.

She was Kaiden and Kieran's oldest friend, closer to them than blood in every way that mattered, and I had sworn to them — sworn to myself — that I would never be the reason that particular trust shattered.

She was also, whether I accepted it or not, whether the Moon Goddess had any right to demand this of me after everything I had already sacrificed, the other half of a bond I had spent eleven years pretending did not exist.

I watched her sleep for longer than I should have.

Long enough to memorize, again, the particular rhythm of her breathing. Long enough to notice the faint furrow still creased between her brows, even in sleep, as though our argument had followed her down into whatever dreams currently held her. Long enough to hate myself, quietly and thoroughly, for putting that furrow there.

*You don't have that right,* she'd said.

She was right, and I had no defense for it, and still I stood in her doorway at an hour I had no business being awake, watching her the way a starving man watches a meal he has forbidden himself from touching.

I thought, not for the first time, of crossing the room. Of sitting at the edge of her bed the way I used to when she was young and couldn't sleep, when nightmares chased her out of her own room and into whatever chair I occupied at the time. I thought of smoothing that furrow from her brow with my thumb, of telling her everything — the bond, the years of silence, the reason my hands never touched her skin anymore, gloved or otherwise, because I no longer trusted what would happen if they did.

I thought of a great many things I had no right to do.

I did none of them.

Instead I stood in her doorway until my chest ached from something that had nothing to do with the run, memorizing the shape of her in moonlight the way I had memorized it a hundred times before and would likely memorize it a hundred times again, and then, quietly, carefully, I stepped back into the hall and pulled her door shut behind me.

°°°

My own room felt colder than usual when I finally reached it.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long while without lighting a single candle, gloves still on, the moon tracking slowly across my window the same way it had tracked across hers not twenty minutes earlier.

Somewhere beneath the estate, in whatever quiet corner of instinct my wolf Soren retreated to when I forced him back beneath my skin, I could feel him pressing against the edges of my control. Restless. Unsatisfied. The run had not been enough tonight, and both of us knew it.

*Ours,* he said. He had been saying it for eleven years, patient and relentless in equal measure, growing louder with every year that passed, every year I refused him.

*Not yet,* I told him, the same answer I always gave.

He did not believe me anymore. If I was honest with myself, standing at the edge of whatever precipice tonight's argument had pushed us toward, I was no longer certain I believed it either.

I stripped off my gloves at last, alone in the dark where no one could see the faint claw marks scored permanently into my palms — the price of eleven years spent holding a wolf back from something he considered rightfully his — and did not sleep until the sky outside had already begun to gray toward another dawn.