Chapter 4
1344 Words
Emma
“Everything you remember is true.”
The words landed, and the room felt suddenly too small.
I waited for the grin, the “relax, concussions cause weird dreams, no werewolves involved.”
He didn’t smile.
He just dragged the chair from the corner and set it beside my bed. The legs whispered over the floor. He sat forward, forearms on his thighs, gray eyes fixed on me.
“Okay,” I said finally, my voice thinner than I liked. “So this is the part where you explain how the laws of physics took a vacation.”
“This is the part where I explain where you are,” he said, “and what I am.”
“Great. Because I’d really like to know if this is morphine or my brain having a creative crisis.”
One corner of his mouth almost twitched. “You’re not in a city hospital,” he said. “This is a private medical wing. My people run it. It’s attached to a larger estate in my territory. We’re far from any human town.”
Human. That word landed wrong.
“So when you say ‘private facility,’” I said slowly, “you mean… what? Secret billionaire compound?”
“It’s a palace,” he said simply. “Secluded. Protected.”
A short, hysterical laugh scraped out of me. “Of course it is.”
“Your car crashed on the edge of my lands,” he went on. “The nearest human hospital is too far. In this weather, you wouldn’t have made it. Bringing you here was the only way to keep you alive.”
My fingers curled in the sheets. “You keep saying ‘human’ like that’s a separate category from you,” I said. “And ‘my lands’ is a lot for a guy without a crown.”
“I’m not human,” he said. “And ‘my lands’ is accurate.”
The room tilted a little. I grabbed onto sarcasm. “Okay. So what are you? Please tell me this is the part where you say Batman.”
“No.”
He held my gaze. When he spoke again, his voice had the same calm weight it had in the snow.
“I’m a werewolf,” he said. “This is werewolf territory. The wolf you saw was me.”
The words hit like a stone dropped in water.
I searched his face for the crack in the lie. A smirk, a twitch, anything.
Nothing.
“Wow,” I said, a laugh tearing out of me, too high. “You are really committed to this.”
“Some myths are exaggerated,” he said. “Some aren’t.”
“Right.” I shifted, trying to sit up. Pain flared through my ribs, bright and sharp. “From where I’m lying, this looks like: get cheated on, crash my car, wake up in an unknown palace in the middle of nowhere with a stranger who claims to be a werewolf. You see how that sounds like a very specific horror movie, yes?”
His jaw flexed once. “You’re not a prisoner,” he said. “You’re under my protection. You were dying. I brought you to the safest place I have.”
“Without asking me,” I shot back. “Normal people call an ambulance. They don’t scoop you up and haul you to a castle.”
“Normal people wouldn’t have reached you in time.”
The words hit an old, raw place. “You keep deciding things for me,” I said, the words coming faster. “Moving me around. Explaining reality like you get to choose which parts count. I don’t like feeling trapped. I don’t like having my life yanked out of my hands.”
He just took it. No flinch, no anger.
“I’m not asking you to trust me,” he said after a moment. “I’m telling you that you’re not insane. What you saw wasn’t a hallucination. And you’re not here by accident.”
Cold slid down my spine.
“Explain the ‘not by accident’ part,” I said. “Because from here it looks a lot like wrong place, wrong time.”
“It isn’t,” he said quietly. “There’s another reason.”
“Of course there is,” I muttered. “Let me guess, I’m secretly the Chosen One.”
“You’re not the Chosen One.” A thread of dry humor edged his tone. “You’re something else.”
“Comforting,” I said.
He let that sit. Then, “My name is Lucian Blackwood,” he said. “I’m the Alpha King.”
I stared. “Alpha… King,” I repeated. “Is that an official title or did you just mash together the two most obnoxious words you could think of?”
His mouth actually twitched. “It’s what I am,” he said. “Among my kind, there are packs. Each pack has an Alpha. Above them, one Alpha rules them all. That’s me.”
“So you’re king of the werewolves,” I said. “Sure. Why not.”
“If I had a business card, that’s more or less what it would say,” he said.
Despite myself, a short laugh slipped out. It died quickly.
Because as ridiculous as it sounded, something in me was keeping score. The way the nurse and doctor had left the room the second he asked. The way the staff deferred to him. The memory of a huge black wolf ramming its shoulder against my door, not to kill me, but to get me out.
He wasn’t bragging. He was just… stating facts.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Hypothetically. Let’s say I don’t start screaming. What does any of this have to do with me? What’s the ‘other reason’ I’m here?”
His gaze sharpened, gray eyes going almost metallic.
“There’s something you need to understand about my kind,” he said. “About how we find partners.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” I said. “I just caught my boyfriend with his pants down. I am officially off-limits for any kind of relationship talk, especially the supernatural kind.”
“This isn’t about dating advice,” he said. “It’s how we’re made.”
The way he said it sent a strange little shiver through my chest.
“We can choose,” he went on. “Date. Take lovers. Marry for convenience. But there is only one person we’re truly bound to. One other being the Bond will accept.”
I hated how the word bound hooked under my ribs.
“One person,” I said.
“One Mate,” he said. “We call it the Mate Bond. It’s instinct and… more than instinct. When a wolf finds their Mate, there’s no doubt. The Bond snaps into place. We know.”
“So what, you sniff someone and the universe sends a push notification?” I asked.
“It isn’t an excuse,” he said, a hint of steel under the calm. “It binds us as much as them. We don’t get to walk away from it.”
My heart was beating too fast. The monitor tattled with a slight uptick in the beeps.
“Again,” I said, forcing lightness into my tone, “sounds like a you problem. Somewhere out there is your magical wolf soulmate, and I hope she’s having a great night, but what does this have to do with me?”
He was quiet for a long breath.
When he spoke, the air between us felt heavier.
“From the moment I scented your blood on the air,” he said quietly, “the Bond snapped tight inside me.”
My pulse stuttered. The monitor spiked.
“What?” The word scraped out of my raw throat.
Lucian Blackwood didn’t look away.
“To me,” he said, every syllable steady and certain, “you are my Mate.”
- Writer
