Mated to the Alpha Who Can't Have Me

The Wrong Place, The Wrong Man

Seraphina's POV

I had one rule in every new place I went to.

Do not be remembered.

It was not a complicated rule. It did not require intelligence or strength or any of the things people assumed survival demanded. It only required discipline. Keep your head down. Speak when spoken to. Eat what was given. Sleep when permitted. Vanish into the background like furniture, like wallpaper, like something so unremarkable that the eye slid over it without stopping.

I had been following that rule for six years. Since the night I was seventeen and the world I had been born into was burned to the ground and everyone who knew my real name was burned with it.

Everyone except me.

I was very good at surviving. I was less good at explaining why I bothered.

Blackridge Pack was my fourth placement in three years. The woman who ran the servant quarters, a stout, no-nonsense omega named Marta, had assigned me a cot in the far corner of the sleeping hall, given me two grey dresses and a bar of soap, and told me to stay out of the way of the warriors and especially out of the way of the King's men who were occupying the eastern wing until further notice.

I had nodded and said nothing and intended to follow every word of that instruction without deviation.

That had been my intention.

The problem with intentions was that they did not account for sleeplessness.

I had never slept well. Not since the fire. I woke in the deep hours of the night with my heart hammering and my hands reaching for something that was no longer there, grasping at smoke and memory until the present slowly reassembled itself around me. Tonight was no different. The sleeping hall was full of soft breathing and the particular heaviness of exhausted bodies, and I lay in the dark with my eyes wide open and my mind refusing to be quiet.

Eventually I gave up.

I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders and slipped out through the side door into the cool night air, following the narrow path along the outer wall that led to the small garden behind the kitchens. I had found it that afternoon during my first walk around the grounds, a neglected square of overgrown herbs and an old stone bench, quiet and forgotten and exactly the kind of place no one ever came to.

I sat on the bench and pulled my knees to my chest and let myself breathe.

The night was clear. The moon was almost full, washing everything in pale silver light that made the world look like a different place entirely, softer and less dangerous than it was in daylight. I had always loved the moon. My mother used to say that was because of what I was, what we were, but I did not let myself think about my mother. Not anymore. Thinking about her led to places I could not afford to go.

I closed my eyes.

I had almost found something close to stillness when I heard footsteps.

My eyes opened immediately. Every muscle in my body pulled tight. I tracked the sound automatically, the habit of six years of keeping myself alive, calculating direction and distance and weight before I had fully processed that I was doing it. The footsteps were coming from the far end of the path, steady and unhurried, belonging to someone who was not trying to be quiet because they had no reason to be.

Someone who was used to owning whatever space they moved through.

I knew who it was before he came around the corner.

I do not know how I knew. I only know that something in my chest recognized the sound of him the way you recognize a song you have not heard in years, suddenly and completely and with an ache you cannot explain.

The Alpha King stepped into the moonlight.

He had shed the heavy outer coat he had been wearing in the courtyard. He was dressed simply now; a dark shirt, dark trousers, the kind of clothing that should have made him look ordinary and somehow made him look more dangerous instead. His dark hair was slightly disheveled, like a man who had been running his hands through it. Like a man who could not sleep either.

He saw me the moment I saw him.

We both went completely still.

For three full seconds, neither of us moved or spoke. The garden held its breath around us, the rustling of leaves and the distant sound of the pack settling into night suddenly very far away. There was only the moonlight and the silence and the ten feet of space between us that felt like nothing at all.

I stood up. The bench scraped against the stone and I winced at the sound.

I apologize, my King. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that. Inside I was calculating exits with the focused desperation of someone who understood exactly how dangerous this moment was. I did not know anyone would be here. I will go.

I moved to step past him.

Stop.

His voice was quiet. That was the most unsettling thing about it. I had expected a command delivered like a blade, sharp and cold and absolute. Instead, it came out low, almost careful, like a man choosing a word he had not planned to use.

I stopped.

I did not turn around.

Look at me.

Every instinct I had screamed at me not to. Looking at him in the courtyard had been a mistake. I had felt it the moment our eyes met, something pulling loose inside my chest that I had spent six years keeping firmly locked in place. Looking at him again in the dark, alone, with the moon overhead and not forty witnesses between us, was not a mistake I could afford to make twice.

I turned around anyway.

His eyes found mine immediately, like they had been waiting.

In daylight, they were dark and unreadable, the eyes of a king who had long since learned to keep everything important hidden behind them. In moonlight, they were something else entirely. In moonlight there was something in them that looked almost like what I felt in my own chest, something raw and bewildered and furious at itself for existing.

What is your name? He said.

A simple question. The most dangerous question anyone could ask me.

I lifted my chin.

Sera, I said. Not a lie. Not the whole truth either. Just enough to answer without opening a door I could never close again.

He looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that takes inventory, that notes and catalogues and files away. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was seeing more than I was showing him, that whatever instinct had made him stop in that courtyard today was whispering things to him now that I very much did not want whispered.

You should not be out here alone at night, Sera, he said finally.

Neither should you, my King, I said.

The words were out before I could stop them.

Something shifted in his expression. Not anger. Something more complicated than anger, something that moved through his eyes like weather and was gone before I could name it. And then, quietly and unexpectedly, the corner of his mouth moved.

Not quite a smile.

But close.

Go inside, he said. And stay out of the dark.

I did not wait to be told twice. I pulled my shawl tight and walked past him and did not look back, not once, all the way to the sleeping hall door. I slipped inside and pressed my back against the cold wood and stood there in the dark with my heart hitting my ribs like it was trying to get out.

He had not moved when I left. I knew because I had listened.

I stood there for a long time, breathing carefully, telling myself that it meant nothing. That it was a chance encounter. That the pull I felt when he looked at me was simply nerves, simply the reasonable fear of a girl with a dangerous secret standing too close to the most powerful man alive.

I was very good at lying to myself.

I had been doing it for six years.

But standing in the dark with the moonlight still catching in my memory and the sound of his voice still settled somewhere in my chest like it belonged there, I had the quiet and terrible feeling that I was running out of time to keep believing my own stories.