The Alpha CEO's Runaway Bride: Marked, Pregnant, and Claimed by His Rival

CHAPTER 2

AXEL

The car came at me like a missile, and I did not move.

Rain hammered the road, headlights swinging wild as the driver lost control. Any sane man would have jumped out of the way. My legs would not listen. Something inside me, my wolf Korrigan, had gone completely still, locked onto a scent rushing toward me through the storm. A scent I had never smelled in my life.

The car spun off the road and slammed into the ditch a few feet from where I stood. Metal screamed. Glass sprayed across the wet gravel. Steam hissed up from the crumpled hood into the rain.

I was at the driver's door before I decided to move.

The window had shattered. Inside, a woman hung sideways against her seatbelt, soaked white fabric pooled around her like a fallen cloud. Blood ran from a small cut above her eyebrow, mixing with the rain on her cheek.

A wedding dress.

I tore the door off its hinges and reached in to cut the belt with one claw. The second I lifted her into my arms, her scent hit me full force, and Korrigan let out a sound I had never heard from him before. Not a growl. Something closer to a whine.

Vanilla and rain and something underneath, warm and sweet, like sugar against skin. My whole body went tight, every muscle locking at once.

Then I caught a second scent, smaller, hidden under the first. So faint I almost missed it.

A second heartbeat. Fast and tiny, fluttering inside hers.

She was pregnant.

For a man who had not felt anything but anger and ambition in eight years, that small fluttering heartbeat hit me harder than the crash had hit the car.

I stood frozen in the rain, staring down at her face. She could not be older than twenty three. Dark hair stuck to her cheeks in wet strands. Long lashes. Lips parted, breathing slow and shallow against my chest. Rain ran down my own jaw and I barely noticed. I am six foot four, built from years of training and fighting for everything I own, and right now I was standing in the middle of a storm holding a stranger like she was made of glass.

My eyes dropped to the car door, where gold letters were stamped under a crest I knew too well. WILDER INDUSTRIES BRIDAL FLEET.

My blood went cold.

Wilder.

Tonight was the wedding every pack in three territories had been talking about for months. Zane Wilder, golden boy CEO, finally marrying the Hale Alpha's daughter. I had gotten an invitation myself, and I had thrown it straight into the fire without reading past his name.

This was her. The bride.

Running, alone, in the rain, on the night of her own wedding, carrying Wilder's pup.

Korrigan snarled inside me, hard enough that my jaw ached. For one second I almost set her back down in the wreck and walked away. The Hales meant nothing to me. Wilder meant everything, and not in a good way.

Eight years ago, his father sat in my family's pack house and smiled while he signed papers that stripped my father of our land, our company, and our name. Three months later my father was dead, and the Wilders wore black to his funeral like grief was just another thing they could buy.

I spent eight years building Raines Corp out of nothing, just so one day I could stand across from a Wilder and take everything from them the way they took everything from me.

And now his bride was lying in my arms, soaked and bleeding, carrying his child.

I should have left her there for his people to find.

Korrigan would not let me.

He pushed against my ribs so hard I felt my own pulse in my teeth. Mine. The word rose from somewhere deep, somewhere I did not understand. Not his. Mine.

It made no sense. I did not know her name. I did not know her face an hour ago. But holding her against my chest, feeling the warmth of her skin through soaked fabric, smelling that scent that was already burning itself into my memory, I understood one thing with total certainty.

If anyone tried to take her out of my arms right now, I would rip their throat out before I let them.

I looked down at her again. Even unconscious, her eyebrows pulled together, like whatever she had been running from was still chasing her in her dreams. My thumb moved without my permission, brushing rain off her cheek, and Korrigan went quiet for the first time since the car came around the bend.

Whoever this woman was, something about her had stopped me dead in the middle of a road in a storm, like my body knew her before my mind caught up.

I pressed two fingers to her throat. Her pulse was strong. The cut on her head was already slowing. She would live.

That was when I heard the engines.

Two sets of headlights turned onto the road behind us, cutting through the rain, moving fast. Black SUVs, blacked out windows, the exact model Wilder Industries security used all over the city.

I pulled her tighter against my chest and stepped back into the shadow of the trees.

The SUVs slowed as they reached the wreck, then stopped. Doors opened. Men in dark suits climbed out into the rain, flashlights sweeping over the broken glass, the empty driver's seat, the skid marks leading off the road.

"This is her car," one of them said into a radio. "She's not in it. Spread out, check the tree line."

A second voice answered through the static, low and furious. A voice I knew, even crackling and broken.

Zane Wilder.

"I don't care how you find her. I don't care what condition she's in. Just find Scarlett before she ruins everything I've built tonight."

Scarlett.

Korrigan went completely still inside me.

So that was her name. I rolled it around in my head once, twice, and felt something settle into place, like a key turning in a lock I did not know I had.

I looked down at her face one more time. Whatever Wilder had done to her tonight, whatever had sent her flying down this road in a wedding dress with no driver and no guard, it had not been an accident, and neither was this. Korrigan had stopped my feet in the middle of the road for a reason. He did not do anything without one.

A flashlight beam swung toward the tree line, closer, closer, until the light almost touched the toe of my boot. I felt her heartbeat against my chest, steady and warm, and that second tiny heartbeat underneath it, and I made a decision I knew, even as I made it, I could never take back.