The Alpha's Cursed Mate

The Alpha's Cursed Mate Chapter One: The Offering The forest smelled like copper and rain. Elena Voss stood at the edge of the tree line with her wrists bound in silver rope, not because silver could hold her, but because it burned, and pain kept prey obedient. Six men in dark cloaks flanked her, none of them looking at her directly, all of them walking like men headed to a funeral instead of a ceremony. She supposed, in a way, it was both. "You'll want to keep your eyes down when we reach the clearing," the man beside her muttered. He was young, barely out of his teens, and his hands shook every time he adjusted his grip on her arm. "He doesn't like being looked at straight on. Not since." He stopped himself. "Since what?" Elena asked. He didn't answer. None of them ever answered. She'd heard the stories the way everyone in the northern territories had passed hand to hand like a disease. The Alpha of the Ashwood pack was not simply a werewolf. Something had happened to him seven years ago, something the elders refused to name, and he had come back from it wrong. Half-beast, half-something-older. A creature who drank as much as he howled. The villages called him the Cursed Alpha, and they gave him what he demanded once every season, so that he would stay in his mountain and leave the rest of them alone. This season, he had asked for her by name. That detail terrified Elena more than the moon rising fat and white over the black trees, more than the silver eating into her skin, more than the low, rolling growl she swore she could feel in the soles of her feet before she ever heard it. They hadn't told her family why. They hadn't told her why, either. Only that the debt her village owed the pack had come due, and that the Alpha had looked through a list of names, hers among them and stopped. Her. She didn't know him. She had never so much as seen the mountain up close. And yet apparently he had seen something in a name on a page that made him want her enough to end a season of peace over it. The clearing opened in front of them like a wound in the trees, moonlight pouring down into it in a silver column, and Elena's breath caught. He was already waiting. Not the wolf, not yet. The wolf was a shadow at the edge of the light, easily nine feet of muscle and black fur, eyes burning red like coals someone had forgotten to put out. It watched her with a stillness that felt more dangerous than movement would have. But it was the man standing in front of the wolf who made her knees lock. He was beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful: pale, precise, cold. Blond hair swept back from a face that belonged on old church windows, not on something that fed. His eyes were red too, but lit from within, like something was burning behind them that had nothing to do with reflected moonlight. Blood touched the corner of his mouth, dark and unhurried, like he hadn't bothered to wipe it away because he hadn't expected to need to. He wore all black. He held a wineglass of something that was not wine. "Leave her," he said, and his voice was quiet, which was somehow worse than if he had shouted. The men let go of her rope so fast it fell into the wet grass. They were gone between one breath and the next, swallowed by the trees, leaving Elena alone in the clearing with a monster in a man's shape and a monster in a wolf's shape, both watching her like she was the last mystery either of them had left to solve. "So you're the Cursed Alpha," she said, because silence felt like it would kill her faster than he could. Something flickered across his face, there and gone, too fast for her to name it. "Is that what they call me now?" "That's what everyone calls you." "Everyone," he repeated, almost to himself, like the word amused him and hurt him in the same breath. He set the glass down on a flat stone beside him without looking at it, a gesture so casual it seemed rehearsed a thousand times over. "And what do you know about what happened to me, little sacrifice?" "I know you drink blood, and you took a woman by name for no reason anyone will explain." "There's always a reason." He took a step closer, and the wolf behind him mirrored the movement exactly, like a shadow stitched to his heels. "You're simply not going to like it." Elena's hands curled into fists at her sides, silver rope biting welts into her wrists. She had promised herself in the wagon on the way here that she would not cry, would not beg, would not give him the satisfaction of watching her fall apart the way she assumed every offering before her must have. "Then tell me. If I'm going to die tonight, I'd like to know why." His red eyes went very still. "Die," he said slowly, testing the word like it tasted wrong. "Is that what you think this is?" "What else would it be?" For a long moment he only looked at her, and something about that look patient, almost pitying, edged with a grief she couldn't place on a face that terrifying made the first crack of doubt open in her chest. As if the story she'd been told her whole life had holes in it she was only now standing close enough to see. "You were told I asked for you," he said. "Did anyone tell you why I knew your name at all?" Elena said nothing. She hadn't thought to ask, because in seven years of stories nobody had ever suggested the Cursed Alpha knew anyone before he took them. "No," he said softly, answering his own question. "Of course they didn't." He crouched, closing some of the distance between them without closing all of it, and for the first time she noticed his hands were shaking not with hunger, but with something closer to restraint. "There's a great deal that got left out of the story they gave you, little sacrifice. Starting with the fact that I am not the one you should be afraid of tonight." Behind him, the wolf let out a low sound that was almost, impossibly, a warning, and it was not aimed at her. It was aimed at the trees. Elena turned, following the wolf's burning stare toward the tree line, and that was when she saw them: a second set of red eyes, watching from the dark, belonging to no wolf and no man she recognized and belonging, somehow, to a face she did. She knew that jaw. She knew that scar above the left eyebrow. Her breath left her in a single, silent rush. "That's not possible," she whispered. The Alpha, the man everyone had told her to fear, rose slowly to his feet in front of her, putting his body, without a word, between Elena and whatever stood in the trees. "No," he agreed quietly, and for the first time his voice cracked with something that sounded almost human. "It shouldn't be. But I imagine you have a great many questions now about who came to collect a debt tonight, and who simply followed the trail here to finish something he started seven years ago." The wind shifted, carrying blood and pine and the particular electric stillness of a held breath, and Elena Voss understood, with a cold certainty that settled into her bones like ice water, that she had walked into this clearing believing she knew exactly which monster to fear. She had been wrong about all of it.