The Alpha's Vampire Princess

Chapter 2: Temptation in the Woods

DEMI

By sunrise, I had already hidden three empty blood bags, swallowed enough suppressants to numb my tongue, and frosted a wedding cake as if I were not in a werewolf pack house one scent spike away from disaster. The morning dissolved into sugar, stress, and wedding logistics, and I performed like a normal human baker with the focus of someone defusing a bomb in an apron.

Thanks to Hannah, I had smuggled a few scent-masked blood bags into the room fridge without incident. Less dignified was the part where I drank them all within five minutes of locking myself in. My throat burned anyway. Wolf scent did something ugly to my hunger, sharpening it until every heartbeat in the house sounded like a personal invitation.

I shredded the empty bags, flushed what I could and destroyed the rest, swallowed a double dose of my little candies, and went straight to the kitchen. At my request, the staff had been reduced to a minimum. Officially, it made the cake work easier. Unofficially, it limited the number of delicious-smelling witnesses.

To my surprise, I liked them. The kitchen wolves argued about frosting, teased each other over coffee, and treated yeast with the kind of reverence I respected. After an hour, their scents dulled from crisis to background temptation—less open vein, more forbidden glazed doughnut behind glass. Progress. Terrifying, chemically assisted progress.

I had just finished boxing the mini cakes when the room went too quiet. The chatter had drained away while I was lining up pastries with surgical focus. When I turned, a man stood in the doorway, watching me as if I were either interesting or evidence.

“I heard we had a miracle worker in the kitchen,” he said, gaze bright and far too sharp. “No one mentioned she’d be intriguing.” He smiled like he knew what smiles were for, but the look in his eyes measured more than it flirted with. “Kevin Edwards. Silver Pine Beta. You must be Demi, the famous cake master.”

“That depends,” I said, folding a cake box closed. “Famous sounds taxable.”

He was exactly the person Hannah had warned me about: high-ranking, charming, and apparently skilled at turning casual conversation into an interrogation without leaving fingerprints. Every easy smile from him had a second edge. I cleared my throat and put on my most harmless baker smile.

“Yes. Demi. Hannah’s friend. Wedding cake provider. Occasional frosting hazard.”

Kevin leaned against the doorway in shorts and confidence, looking like trouble had taken a vacation and come back tan. I returned to wiping the counter. Disinterest was a strategy. Unfortunately, fate had never respected my strategies.

The problem was not that Kevin smelled good. Wolves always smelled alive in a way my body found rude. The problem was that something beneath his cedar-and-salt warmth hit the wrong part of me—clean pulse, summer skin, the metallic promise of blood moving strong under all that easy confidence. My hunger noticed before I did. It lifted its head, interested, and I nearly dropped the towel trying to look like a woman thinking about frosting instead of veins.

“You look like you’re about to frost someone to death,” he said.

The piping bag burst in my hand. Cream splattered across the table, my sleeve, and what remained of my dignity. “Oh, damn it.” I grabbed a towel. Kevin’s pulse kicked once beneath all that polished ease. He was nervous too. Blood always told the truth.

“Come for a walk when you’re done. Fresh air. Fewer knives.”

“I have work,” I said, turning away before my mouth could water more obviously. Hannah’s warning label flashed in my head: Do not approach unless you want to become this wolf’s main course.

“You’re finished,” he countered, glancing at the completed cakes and squeaky-clean tables. “And if you say no, I’ll take it personally.”

I looked around. The cakes were finished. The counters gleamed. My excuses had abandoned me. Kevin was handsome, curious, and absolutely planning something. Being alone with him was a terrible idea. Naturally, I said yes—after making him put on actual clothes and promising, with great sincerity, that if he tried anything stupid, I would weaponize pastry tools.

We took a trail behind the pack house, where the trees softened the wedding noise and the air smelled of pine, damp earth, and wolf. Outside, Kevin flirted less. To my surprise, he spoke like a person instead of a pick-up line, though every now and then his gaze flicked to me with Beta-sharp attention, as if he were cataloging the things I tried not to show.

That unsettled me more than the flirting. Swagger, I could deflect. Sincerity was slipperier. Beneath the charm, Kevin had a steadiness that made me forget, for one dangerous minute, that caution was supposed to be my personality for the weekend. Then his attention sharpened on a breath I had not meant to hold, and I remembered exactly why Hannah had warned me.

“People think being Beta means I get the fun parts and none of the fallout,” Kevin said after a while, kicking a pinecone off the trail. “Mostly it means I clean up after Dominic’s moods and keep idiots from starting fights they can’t win.” He grinned when I looked at him. “The flirting is just community outreach.” I laughed before I could help it and hated how easy that felt.

We talked about the city, the bakery, pack life, and harmless things with safe edges. When I admitted I had once swapped chili powder for cinnamon in a rude customer’s rolls, Kevin laughed hard enough to stop walking.

“He broke my assistant’s heart,” I said. “Then ordered pastries for his new girlfriend’s birthday. In my bakery. Some crimes require seasoning.”

“Remind me never to wrong you,” Kevin said, still grinning. Then his amusement thinned. He looked at me a second too long. “What do you think about mates?”

I slowed; that was something I wasn’t expecting. “I think fate has a terrible sense of humor,” I said. “And if the universe had someone picked for me, it has done an impressive job hiding him.”

I had avoided the subject for years. Not because I believed fate was impossible, but because believing in it felt greedy. Vampires could wait decades for anything. Werewolves found their other half like their souls had a tracking system. Kevin looked old enough to have been searching for a while, and tired enough for that search to hurt.

“I wish I had your approach,” he said, then stopped. Something too careful to be flirtation sharpened his expression for one fragile second. Before I could decide whether to panic or lie better, his gaze went distant.

Mind link. I had heard werewolves describe it, but seeing it was different. His eyes clouded, his body locked, and every easy line of him went hard. When he looked at me again, the charm was gone.

“I’m sorry, Demi. I need to go. Something’s happened at the border.”

Before I could ask what, he was gone, blurring through the trees. Whatever had called him away mattered more than flirting with me. That should not have stung. It did.

The moment he disappeared, my control started to fray. Hunger scraped up my throat, hot and humiliating. I should have gone straight back to the pack house. My purse was there—more suppressants, scent blockers, every careful little lie that kept me soft-edged enough to pass. But Kevin’s scent still clung under my tongue, and between me and my room waited a house full of laughing wolves, warm hands, open throats, and heartbeats too close to ignore. One wrong breath, one friendly touch, and I would not be heading for medicine. I would be heading for someone’s throat.

Hannah’s carefully paranoid map saved me again. She had uploaded it to my phone the moment I agreed to be more than the cake delivery girl and actually attend the wedding as a guest. Emergency routes. Low-patrol pockets. Places where wildlife gathered and pack wolves rarely bothered unless something had already gone wrong. I had laughed when she did it, called her dramatic, and promised I would never need it. Now I followed the glowing line deeper into the forest like it was the only sane thought I had left.

The hunt had to be quick, clean, and invisible. No deer. No foxes. Nothing large enough to leave a story behind. Rabbits, then. Small, sweet, easy to bury. My least favorite kind of practical.

I found them near a den, warm life pulsing beneath leaves and roots. My fangs scraped my lower lip. The forest narrowed to scent, pulse, movement. I crouched. Chose. Leapt.

The blood was warm and thin, but it quieted the screaming place inside me. I kept my eyes closed until it was done. Then shame arrived, precise and familiar. This was the part of me the court had buried, and for one awful minute, I understood why. I cleaned my mouth, checked my clothes, and buried the bodies with a whispered apology to every soft, innocent creature unfortunate enough to be born near my bad decisions.

On the way back, the hunger was quieter. My heart was not. Somewhere behind me, the forest held its breath. A twig snapped once, too deliberate to be nothing. I did not turn around. I could not shake the feeling that Silver Pine had already seen more of me than I meant to show.