The Alpha’s Parasite

CHAPTER TWO

The air in the cell didn't just get warm. It turned thick. It tasted like chewed copper and burnt pine.

I watched the blood drip from his chin. It hit the porous gray concrete. One drop. Then another.

Somewhere down the hall, a pipe was leaking. Drip. Drip. The rhythm was entirely out of sync with the ragged, tearing sound of his breathing.

He was on his hands and knees.

This was Kaelen. The man who had stood on a balcony three days ago and told his entire pack I was nothing but a political complication. The man who had signed the order to put me in this subterranean box.

Now he was breathing through his teeth, choking on his own blood to keep the animal inside him from taking the wheel.

I didn't move. I didn't reach for the blanket.

My bare feet were numb from the cold floor, but the closer he dragged himself, the more my skin prickled with phantom heat.

"Get out," I said.

My voice didn't shake. I was actually annoyed by how calm I sounded. I wanted to sound angry. I just sounded bored.

Kaelen’s head snapped up.

His eyes were voids. No iris. No gold. Just the pitch-black of a predator in the final stage of a rut.

He tried to speak. What came out was a wet, fractured sound. A chest-deep rattle.

He dragged his right hand forward. His claws were fully extended. They scraped against the stone, leaving four pale white lines in the dust.

He was fighting it. The sheer violent force of the compulsion.

I wondered, vaguely, if he bit his tongue completely off, would it grow back? Alphas healed fast. But a severed muscle was complicated.

"I said," I repeated, shifting my weight against the damp wall, "get out of my cell."

He stopped moving. He was three feet away.

The heat rolling off him was absurd. It was like sitting next to an open oven door. A bead of sweat rolled down the center of my back, tracing the line of my spine. I hadn't been warm in seventy-two hours. The sudden shift in temperature made my head swim.

"Can't," he choked out.

The word cost him. The veins in his neck were thick, pulsing blue cords.

"You own the building, Kaelen. You have the keys. You can do whatever you want."

"Not this."

He pushed himself up. Not to his feet. Just to his knees.

He was massive. Even kneeling, his shoulders blocked out the dim light spilling in from the corridor. He was wearing a dark dress shirt, but it was ruined. Torn at the collar, soaked through with sweat. The expensive silk clung to the heavy slabs of muscle underneath.

I noticed a loose silver thread on his cuff. It caught the light. It bothered me. He was falling apart, but his tailor was excellent.

"You're in rut," I said. State the fact. Strip the power.

A low, vibrating hum started in his chest. It vibrated through the floorboards. It vibrated in my molars.

"Feral," he corrected. His voice was a rasping ruin. "Feral heat."

Ah.

A feral heat wasn't just biology. It was a punishment. It happened when an Alpha rejected a true mate, and the wolf decided to kill the human half for the insult. It burned them from the inside out. The only cure was the mate.

The mate he had publicly discarded.

"Sounds painful," I said. I looked at my fingernails. There was dirt under the cuticles. I needed a shower.

Kaelen let out a sound that wasn't human. It was a sob of pure agony, masked as a growl.

He closed the distance.

I didn't flinch. I let him crash into me.

He didn't attack. He collapsed.

His heavy, sweat-drenched head hit my knees. His arms wrapped around my thighs, gripping the back of my legs with a desperate, bruising force.

He buried his face in my lap.

The Alpha of the Northern Ridge. The butcher of the coast. Kneeling in the filth of his own dungeon, burying his face in my lap like a starving man finding bread.

His breath soaked through the thin cotton of my pants. It was scalding.

"Please," he whispered into my skin.

I looked down at him. The thick, dark hair. The broad expanse of his shoulders shuddering with the effort of holding himself back.

If I pushed him away right now, his heart would give out. The feral heat would boil his blood until he stroked out on this floor.

I should push him.

I lifted my hand. My fingers hovered over the back of his neck.

I didn't want to touch him. I was furious. I was betrayed. But my hand was shaking, and the cold in my bones was screaming at me to take the warmth.

I lowered my hand.

My fingertips brushed the damp hair at the nape of his neck.

Kaelen let out a violent shudder. A fractured groan tore out of his throat. His grip on my thighs tightened until it bruised. He pressed his face harder against me, inhaling my scent like it was oxygen.

"Mine," he breathed against my knee.

The word wasn't a claim. It was an apology. It was a surrender.

"I'm not," I said softly. My thumb stroked the heavy ridge of his spine. The contradiction was jarring. I was denying him while petting him like a wild dog. "You made sure of that, remember?"

"I was wrong." The words were ground out between clenched teeth.

"You were political."

"I was dying." He twisted his head, resting his cheek against my thigh so he could look up at me.

His pitch-black eyes were terrifying up close. There was no humanity left in them. Just the animal, trapped in a burning cage, begging for water.

The blood on his mouth had smeared across my pants.

"Help me," he whispered.

The arrogance was gone. The cold, calculating Alpha who had locked me up was dead. This was just a creature in pain.

But I knew him. I knew the man underneath the wolf. If I saved him now, if I broke the heat and gave him what he needed, he would wake up tomorrow with his power intact. He would lock the cage door again. He would rationalize this.

He would turn my mercy into a weapon.

"What do I get?" I asked.

His brow furrowed. The question confused the wolf. The wolf didn't understand commerce. The wolf only understood need.

"Anything," he choked out. His hands slid up my thighs, his thumbs pressing into my hips. The heat of his touch was searing. "Everything."

"I want the keys."

"Done."

"I want the Beta who dragged me down here."

A low growl rattled his ribs. "Dead. I'll kill him."

"No," I corrected, my fingers tangling tighter in his hair. I pulled his head back, forcing his neck to expose itself. A highly dangerous move. One snap of his jaws and I'd bleed out in seconds. "I'll kill him. You're going to hold him down."

Kaelen stared at me.

The black in his eyes seemed to swirl. The sheer, unadulterated violence in my demand didn't repulse him.

It fed him.

His lips parted. His bloody teeth flashed in the dim light.

"Yes," he rasped.

He didn't hesitate. He sold out his second-in-command for a touch.

That was the terrifying truth about the bond. It made monsters out of men, and it made gods out of the women who held their leashes.

I looked at the heavy iron door of the cell. Then I looked back down at the lethal weapon currently nuzzling into my stomach.

I could let him burn.

But the cell was so cold. And the fire was right here.

"Take your shirt off," I commanded.

Kaelen didn't just take it off. He ripped it. The expensive silk shredded in his claws, falling to the dirty floor in useless gray ribbons.

His chest was a landscape of heavy muscle and thick, jagged scars. His skin was flushed dark red with the fever.

He looked up at me, chest heaving, waiting for the next order.

I leaned forward. The air between us practically hummed with static. I could smell the desperate, volatile shift in his pheromones. He was seconds away from completely snapping.

I didn't give him permission. I just stopped denying him.

Kaelen lunged.

He didn't tackle me to the floor. He caught my hips and lifted me entirely off the ground, standing up in one fluid, terrifyingly powerful motion. He slammed my back against the concrete wall. The impact knocked the breath out of my lungs.

My legs instinctively wrapped around his waist.

He buried his face in the crook of my neck. His teeth scraped against my collarbone. Not a bite. A threat of a bite.

"If you lie to me tomorrow," I whispered into his ear, my hands gripping his heavy shoulders, "I will let you burn next time."

Kaelen’s hands dug into my lower back, pressing me flush against the searing heat of his abdomen.

"There is no next time," he growled, his voice dropping an octave, the sound vibrating directly into my bloodstream. "You're never leaving my sight again."

He bit down on my shoulder. Hard enough to bruise. Not hard enough to break the skin.

I gasped, my fingers digging into his back.

The cold was gone. The fire had won.

And I had absolutely no idea how I was going to survive the ashes.