Cursed to Marry the Alpha

Chapter 4: Long Enough

The fountain kept trickling behind him, indifferent to the way the world had just tilted sideways.

Elira stared at Damon, her pulse a war drum against her ribs. Long enough to hear every word. Which words, exactly? Marcus's threats? Her silence? The parts where she hadn't denied any of it?

"You shouldn't be here," she said. It came out smaller than she wanted.

"I could say the same to you." Damon stepped around the fountain, moving with the unhurried calm of a man who already knew he'd won an argument neither of them had started yet. "Wandering the grounds alone at night, meeting with your father's guard in the dark. Careless, for someone hiding a secret."

"I wasn't meeting him. He found me."

"Does it matter?" Damon's eyes hadn't left her face. "He said your grandmother buried three husbands. He said something is living in your blood. He said I'd have the right to kill you if I knew what it was."

Elira's stomach dropped through the ground.

"You heard all of that."

"I heard enough to know you've been lying to me since the moment we met." His voice stayed level, but there was something coiled beneath it now, something dangerous. "I want to hear the rest. From you. Tonight."

"There's nothing to—"

"Don't." The word cracked like a whip. "Don't stand there and lie to my face again, Elira. Not after everything I just heard."

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the fountain's steady murmur.

Elira's mind raced through every possible lie, every deflection, every half-truth that might satisfy him without handing over the whole terrible weight of it. None of them worked. None of them ever had, not with him. He saw through her like she was made of glass.

"If I tell you," she said slowly, "you'll call off the wedding. The treaty collapses. Both packs go back to war."

"Or," Damon said, "I finally understand why the woman I'm supposed to marry looks at me like I'm a loaded gun."

That landed harder than she expected.

"That's not—" She stopped, swallowed. "That's not why."

"Then why?"

Elira looked away, toward the dark hedges, the black shapes of the trees beyond the garden wall. Anywhere but his face, because his face made it too easy to want to tell him everything.

"My family carries something," she said finally, voice barely above a whisper. "A curse. It's old — older than anyone alive remembers its origin. It passes through the women in my bloodline, generation after generation."

"What kind of curse?"

She closed her eyes. "If the mate bond completes — if it's allowed to finish, fully, the way it was trying to that night in the corridor — the Alpha bound to that woman dies. Not immediately. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. But it always happens. Every time."

The fountain trickled on. Somewhere in the trees, an owl called once and went silent.

Damon didn't move. Didn't speak. His expression had gone carefully, deliberately blank, the kind of stillness she imagined he wore in battle, right before deciding whether to strike.

"That's why you told me it was just paper," he said eventually. "Why you kept pulling away."

"Yes."

"That's why your father agreed to this marriage without blinking. He needed a body to seal the treaty, and he didn't care what body it cost."

Elira's throat tightened. "He doesn't fully believe in the curse. He thinks it's superstition, something my mother clung to because she couldn't explain her own bad luck. He doesn't know I believe it. He doesn't know I intend to keep this bond from ever completing, no matter what it costs me."

"And Marcus?"

"Marcus has always been more careful than my father. He's known about the rumors for years. Tonight was the first time he said it to my face."

Damon was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost its earlier edge.

"You were going to marry me and let me believe none of this was real."

"I was going to marry you and make sure none of this ever became real," Elira corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Yes." She finally looked at him again, forcing herself to hold his gaze even though every instinct screamed at her to look away. "I wasn't going to let you die for a treaty you didn't choose and a curse you didn't ask for. I was going to keep you safe from it. From me."

Something shifted in his expression — the anger cracking, just slightly, into something rawer. Something that looked almost like disbelief.

"You've been planning to spend your entire marriage keeping me at arm's length," he said. "Protecting me. From yourself."

"Yes."

"For how long? A year? Ten? The rest of your life?"

Elira's chin lifted. "For as long as it takes."

Damon crossed the last few feet of distance between them before she could react, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. Close enough that the bond in her chest gave a slow, unmistakable pulse, like it recognized how near he'd come and wanted more.

"That," he said quietly, "is the stupidest, most reckless plan I have ever heard."

"It's the only plan I have."

"Then we need a better one." His hand rose, hesitated, then brushed a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness that didn't match anything she knew about Alphas, about war leaders, about men who were supposed to be ruthless. "Because I am not interested in marrying a woman who plans to spend the rest of her life flinching away from me to keep me alive."

"You don't have a choice."

"I have several choices, little wolf. I'm choosing this one." His thumb grazed her cheekbone, and her breath caught somewhere it had no business catching. "We figure out what's really causing this curse. Together. Before it decides to make the choice for us."

"You don't understand what you're offering."

"Then explain it to me." His voice dropped lower, rougher. "Because right now, all I understand is that some part of me has been searching for you my whole life, and I am not walking away from that because your family carries an old story about dead husbands."

Elira's heart slammed against her ribs, torn between the terror of what he was suggesting and the terrifying relief of not carrying this alone anymore.

"If you're wrong," she whispered, "you'll die."

"If I'm right," Damon said, closing the last inch between them, "we'll both find out what this bond is really trying to tell us."

His forehead dropped to rest against hers, and for one suspended moment, the fountain, the garden, the entire weight of two warring packs disappeared.

Then, from the shadows behind him, a voice cut through the stillness like a blade.

"How touching," Marcus said, stepping out from the treeline, something cold and triumphant glittering in his eyes. "I don't suppose either of you noticed I never actually left."