Twice Shamed, Thrice Blessed

Chapter 4

Keifer

“Please Alpha, please spare my life!” The seer screamed in the dungeon as I approached. The look of fear told me he knew exactly what was coming.

Death.

“Perhaps you should have thought twice before trying to deceive me,” I said, flexing my claws. “You made me come all the way to the Ember pack to find you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn't know it was you. I didn't know it was the Demon of-”

“Would that have stopped you from duping me?”

His face blanched.

“I just… I just needed the money-” His words died down once I grabbed his neck and twisted. The stench of blood filled the dungeon.

The seer’s lifeless body dropped to the floor, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. My claws retracted slowly.

“Alpha…” my Beta murmured, holding out a damp cloth. I took it and wiped the blood from my hands.

“He was a fraud,” I said flatly.

“Yes, Alpha.”

“I crossed half the continent to get here. For nothing.”

My Beta bowed his head and said nothing. Landon was wise like that. He said very little, got the job done, it was exactly why he was perfect as my Beta.

For twenty years, I had searched for someone who could lift the curse, the one that had left me… f*****g inept as a man. I was unable to take a mate, unable to even feel the stirrings of desire like a normal man. Twenty years of shame and hunger and fury.

Then she appeared. The mystery woman in the bar. My masked kitten. Her scent had hit me like wildfire, a mix of honey and rain and my body, my cursed, dead body had woken up.

God! Those blue eyes. The way they rolled when she came, her sweet little mouth parting while I sipped from her, touched her, claimed her. I hadn't thought twice. She had me insane and I had been a man again for the first time in two decades.

Then she vanished like smoke. I swear the gods and the fates really have a bad sense of humor.

I threw the bloody cloth aside and turned to my Beta. “You still haven’t found her?”

“No, Alpha,” Landon said. “We checked every camera from the bar to the hotel. She never removed her mask. It was like she planned it.”

My jaw clenched. “Of course she planned it. She wanted to disappear. But she is mine. She will be mine. I've had a taste of heaven and I need more, dammit.”

“Yes, Alpha.”

“Turn the Ember Pack upside down if you have to,” I growled. “Shake every house, every hidden hole. I don’t care if you have to drag their precious Alpha out of bed. Find her.”

“Yes, Alpha.” Landon bowed again and left.

I stared down at the dead seer one last time. I had come to Ember Pack searching for freedom from the curse not knowing the seer that I thought would break the curse was a fraud. But, I found the one woman who made me feel alive and then lost her.

I was Alpha Keifer of Celestial Pack. And when I wanted something, nothing in this world could keep me from taking it.

Not even my kitten herself.

☾ ⋆｡𖦹｡⋆ ☽

Adela

“You could have avoided all this if you had just signed the papers.” Ronan said, standing at the door to the dungeon. My bags were beside him as well as a guard and Sela herself.

I looked down at the divorce papers in front of me, my hands shaking as I signed my name. Three years of my life, wasted with just a signature.

When I was done, Ronan snatched the papers quickly and handed them to a guard nearby before he stepped closer. Sela was watching us with a proud smile on her face. It was humiliating.

“This is your official rejection,” he said. “You are no longer my mate.”

The bond between us snapped. I gasped as the invisible thread that had tied us together for years disappeared. The pain that filled my chest had me bending over. Tears streaked down my cheeks. This was it. I had no mate. No one.

Ronan didn’t flinch. Instead, he turned to the maid, my maid, and drew her close.

“Sela is my mate now.”

She smirked at me, her hand sliding over his chest possessively. “We should check her bag when she's leaving, Alpha,” she said sweetly. “So we can make sure she doesn’t steal anything on her way out.”

My nails bit into my palms, but I said nothing as the guard rifled through my bags.

“She’s clean,” the guard said at last.

“Good.” Sela said. “Then she can go.”

I stared at her. My wolf snarled, wanting to leap forward, to rip that smug little smile off her face and end her unborn child with a single swipe of my claws.

But I didn’t move.

Ronan, Ronan was simply not worth it. Wasn't it crazy though? Three years with Ronan, and I couldn't get pregnant and then the one time I cheat back on him, I get knocked up by a stranger? The moon goddess must really hate me.

“What are you waiting for? Get out,”

A car waited for me at the edge of the pack house. This was it. I was leaving Nightfall pack, Ronan and everyone behind.

I slid into the car, clutching my bag to my chest, and told the driver to take me to the airport.

I wasn’t going to my father’s house. He had made it clear last night when I called him that he wanted nothing to do with me.

“You have no place in this family,” he had said.

I had been an outcast in my own home. My stepmother had despised me, my stepsister had taunted me, and my father turned a blind eye to it all. Marriage to Ronan had been my escape.

And now that is gone, too.

I looked out the window as the pack lands blurred by while the car moved. Maybe this was what the Moon Goddess wanted. She wanted to break me until there was nothing left.

I pressed a hand to my stomach.

My wolf stirred in my mind. “We’ll survive this, Adela,” she whispered. “We’ll survive them all. We don’t need Ronan or your family. We'll be fine together in the human world.”