Accidentally Pregnant By the Alpha King

KYRUS A plague swept through the supernatural world. Nobody knows where it came from. What it wants is painfully clear: us. The Lycans. The werewolves. The wolves. My species is losing the ability to breed. Male, female — doesn’t matter. Time is stripping our fertility away, one heat cycle at a time. This disease is going to wipe us off the map if we let it, and a pack without pups is already a corpse. Who’s supposed to carry us into the future when there’ll be no one left? The wolf world came apart at the seams. We searched every corner of the globe.My pack is the strongest out there, the most advanced — I made sure of it. I’m the Alpha King of the Lycans. Alpha of The Dark Prowler Pack. Most people just call us the Prowlers. We were centuries ahead of the other packs before humans even figured out how to make fire. Humans don’t know we exist — not unless the mate bond drags one of them into our world, and that’s about as common as snow in July. It’s happened twice. Twice, in our entire history. Most wolves think it’s a myth invented by bored elders. But if a human turns out to be a wolf’s mate, the old laws don’t bend for anyone. Mates are sacred. The Moon Goddess doesn’t make mistakes, and she doesn’t take requests either. Back to the plague. I don’t know what we did to deserve this curse, but I refuse to watch my pack die from it. Our scientists came up with the only plan that made sense: freeze the eggs, freeze the sperm, wait for a cure, and fill our nurseries with IVF-conceived pups the second we get one. Ten years. Ten years trapped in this hell, and not one single pup has been born on Howler land since it started. The samples are the only thing the sickness hasn’t touched. I don’t care how deep this curse runs — I will burn it out by the root for my people. I preserved my own samples too. I hold on to one stupid, stubborn hope: that someday I’ll have pups with my second-chance mate, whenever the Goddess decides to stop making me wait. She promised her to me in a dream, back when I was still grieving. I had a Luna once. She couldn’t survive the grief of losing our unborn pup, so she ended her own life instead. I feel nothing for her now except rage. Katys was weak. She didn’t think twice about what she’d leave behind — a pack with no Luna, bleeding out from a wound she opened herself. I hate her for that. For the cowardice. For the ease with which she chose herself over ten thousand wolves who needed her. Suicide strips a Lycan of the right to rest with our dead, so I buried her in a human cemetery. She didn’t deserve Howler ground. Every pregnant female lost her pup the day the curse hit — mine included. But not one of them followed Katys into the dirt. Only her. Taking your own life is the one sin the Goddess never forgives. That’s why she swore me a second mate. Someone worth the wait. I’ve been waiting ever since. I was in my office that morning, buried in reports about rogue attacks on the border — because apparently a plague wasn’t enough, I also had to babysit every stray mutt too stupid to stay off my land. That’s most of what fills my days now. Putting out pack fires. Running the human-world empire that pays for all of it. Funding a territory this size doesn’t come cheap, so I built a corporate machine that prints money in a world that doesn’t even know I exist. I bought up land the size of half of Oregon around Creek Forest, filed it as a private environmental reserve, and made it illegal for a single human to set foot on it. My people live in peace because of that paperwork. Four smaller packs sit inside my territory, within five hundred kilometers of my front door. I let them run themselves however they want — I don’t care — as long as they don’t cross me. Cross me, and it stops being their problem to solve. Other packs live under my protection outside that circle. And then there are the ones who think they can test me. Every so often, one tries. A knock cracked against my office door and split my train of thought clean in half. “Enter,” I barked. Ivan walked in. My Beta. He always wore that same dead-eyed, carved-from-stone look, but the man was loyal down to the bone — if he weren’t, I’d have taken his head off years ago and found someone who was. This time, though, something was wrong. I could feel it before he said a word. “What happened?” I demanded. Inside my skull, Apex started pacing. My wolf never liked bad news before I’d even heard it. Ivan’s chin dropped. “Forgive me, Alpha. Someone breached the Sanctuary. Your samples are gone.” He stepped back like the words themselves might get him killed. I could feel his wolf shaking through the bond, terrified of what Apex would do with that information. I grabbed my desk — a slab of oak that weighed more than most men — and threw it across the room. It hit the far wall and exploded into splinters, and I didn’t care who heard it. Let the whole territory hear it. My blood went from warm to boiling in under a second. My samples. My only shot at ever having heirs, at ever giving Apex the future the Goddess owed us — gone. My breath turned ragged. Claws split through my fingertips before I even gave the order. Apex roared inside my head, a sound built entirely out of hunger, begging me to let him out to tear something apart. My bones started breaking on their own. I let them. The shift took me the way it always did — agony first, and then something close to relief on the other side of it, my body finally allowed to become what it actually was. Bone snapped and reset. Muscle tore through skin and kept growing. I stretched upward, wider, taller, black fur rippling out across my arms until there was nothing human left to look at. My hands ended in claws built for killing. My jaw pushed forward into a snout lined with teeth no blade could match. My eyes burned. Crinos. The hybrid form. Half wolf, half man, built for exactly one purpose — slaughter. Only the strongest Lycans could hold that shape without losing themselves in it. Ivan dropped to his knees the second I finished, crushed flat under the weight of what was standing in front of him. My clothes hung off me in shreds. Fur covered everything else. I rolled my shoulders. Something in my neck cracked back into place. “Whoever touched what’s mine,” I growled — my voice dragged low and wrong, half me, half Apex, “dies today.” I walked out. Ivan scrambled to catch up, smart enough to keep three steps behind me the whole way. Every wolf in that hallway hit the floor. I only shift into this form when the situation calls for blood, and everyone in the packhouse knew exactly what that meant. I’m not a hero. I never wanted to be one. I’m cruel when cruelty is called for, and I stopped feeling bad about that the day I buried my mate. But I’m fair. Cross that line, and you’ll learn exactly how far I’m willing to go — but stay on the right side of it, and I’ll never lay a hand on you. Someone crossed the line today. It had been too long since I tasted a traitor’s blood.