THE Alpha’s forbidden MATE

The forest held its breath. Raina Duskmoor lay flat against the ridge, the cold soaking through her leathers, her heart beating so hard she was certain the wind would carry the sound of it straight to him. Below her, in the silvered dark of the treeline, Kael Ravenwood walked alone. He always walked alone out here. That was the one habit of his she had learned well enough to build a plan around. Her fingers found the hilt of the blade at her hip. Silver, folded seven times, forged by her own hands over three sleepless nights. It was the only weapon that would do what needed doing to an Alpha of his strength. The pack must never belong to the one who, her mother's voice whispered again, the way it always did in the moments before sleep or violence. The pack must never belong to the one who. She had spent a year finishing that sentence in her head. Tonight she would finish it with her hands instead. Kael stopped walking. Raina's breath caught. He stood in a clearing washed pale by the moon, broad shoulders squared, head tilted as though listening to something only he could hear. She had seen him like this before, from a distance, at gatherings and truces and the handful of times their packs had shared a table instead of a border dispute. She had watched him long enough to know the shape of his stillness, the particular way he held himself when he thought no one was looking. It was that stillness that had undone her, somewhere along the way. She hated that it had. He was not supposed to matter. He was an obstacle, a piece on the board that stood between her and the promise she owed her dying mother. That was all he was allowed to be. And yet her hand shook as she drew the blade free. She thought of her mother's face, gray against the pillows, lips barely moving. She thought of the crown that should have been hers by right of a lifetime spent earning it, stolen from her by a law that would hand it to whichever sister the Moon decided to bless with a mate mark, as if love was a fair way to choose who led a pack. She thought of Elara's soft hands, her soft heart, everything about her sister that had never once been forged for this. If I do this, Raina told herself, there is no law left to invoke. No mate to recognize a claim. Only me. She rose from the ridge like smoke and started down toward the clearing. Kael did not turn. Not yet. She was three long strides from striking distance when a second shape stepped into the clearing from the far treeline, and Raina's whole body locked still. A woman. Golden haired, dressed in Blackridge colors, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who belonged exactly where she was standing. Freya Stonewood. Kael's betrothed, daughter of the Stormridge Alpha, the alliance that had been sealed in ink two winters ago and would be sealed in blood and vows by the time the frost broke this year. "You said you would not be long," Freya said, her voice carrying easy and warm across the clearing, the voice of someone who had never once doubted her welcome. Kael's jaw tightened before he answered her, and something in that small, involuntary flicker of restraint told Raina everything she had refused to let herself know until this exact moment. He did not want to marry Freya Stonewood. He endured her the way a man endures weather. It should not have mattered to Raina at all. It should have made the blade easier to lift. Instead her hand trembled harder. "I needed air," Kael said, and even from a distance Raina could hear how carefully he chose the words, how little of himself he gave away even to the woman he was promised to. She knew that voice. She had heard it directed at her exactly twice in her life, both times across a negotiating table, both times low and controlled and impossible to read, and both times she had gone home afterward and lain awake picking apart every syllable for a meaning that was probably never there. She hated that she remembered. She hated that some traitorous, foolish part of her had hoped, once, that the tightness in his jaw when he looked at Freya might someday look different when he looked at her. None of it mattered. It could not matter. Her mother's voice was louder than all of it, louder than the ache twisting through her chest, louder than the sudden ugly wish that she had come here for any reason other than this one. Finish it, she told herself, and closed the last of the distance, blade rising. She never saw the net. It dropped from the canopy in a rush of rope and weighted iron, and the forest around her erupted with the shapes of Blackridge scouts pouring out of the dark where she had swept for scent and found nothing, where she had been so certain she was alone that she had not thought to check twice. Kael spun toward her with a snarl that shook the clearing, already shifting, already closing the ground between them, and Freya's scream cut through the trees like a blade of its own. Raina hit the ground hard, silver knife knocked from her grip, and somewhere above the chaos a second howl rose through the night. Not Kael's. Not any voice she recognized. Something else was coming.