The Alpha's Dark Secret

Chapter four: The Alpha

The moon was full, and I could feel it in my teeth.

October was always the worst. Something in the cold air made the curse sit closer to my skin, and by the time the harvest moon rose over the pines, I felt like a wire pulled one turn too tight. Every sound was too sharp. Every smell was too loud. Down in the valley, the town was lighting its lanterns for the festival, and I could hear the fiddle from two miles off, thin and cheerful, like someone laughing in another room.

I walked the border alone, on four legs, the way I did every full-moon night. The pack knew to leave me be. I'd never had to ask.

Seven years ago, I had been Alpha of the Black Moon Pack, and in all that time I had never once lost control under a full moon. I wasn't proud of much, but I was proud of that. I managed it the way I managed everything, by wanting nothing.

Nothing to lose, nothing to be used against me.

Nobody knew how bad the curse really got. They saw a cold Alpha who kept his distance and didn't join the feasts. They didn't see the nights I spent out on the cliffs until dawn, with my claws dug into the rock, waiting for the pull to loosen its grip.

Ethan hated that about me. He was my Beta and the only person I'd ever called a friend, and he'd said it once, over a bottle neither of us finished. "You don't live, Kael. You guard," I told him that was my job. He didn't argue. He just gave me that tired look of his, the one he'd been giving me since we were boys, and I changed the subject.

Then the wind turned, and I smelled her.

Rain on warm stone. Wild honey. Underneath it, something green and clean, like the first morning after a long winter. It hit me so hard I stopped mid-stride with one paw in the air and every muscle locked.

Inside me, my wolf went dead silent. Then he said one word.

"Mate".

It wasn't a whisper. It came like a landslide.

Every wolf has one. A person made for them, someone their whole body knows before their mind catches up. Most wolves spend their lives hoping to find theirs. I had spent mine hoping I never would. A mate was just one more way to be hurt.

My wolf didn't care what I hoped. He wanted to run to her. He wanted to circle her, press his head against hers, breathe her in until there was nothing left but her. I stood there shaking with the effort of not moving.

I should have turned and gone the other way. I knew it with perfect clarity.

I followed the scent.

It led me to the old clearing at the edge of our land, where the moonlight came down through the pines in pale columns, and there she was. A small, pale girl in a dark green dress, hands trembling at her sides, hair loose around her shoulders.

She stared at me with wide, silver-grey eyes, and she wasn't screaming. Anyone else would have run. She looked at me as if she'd been waiting.

I forced the change. It hurts every time, bones sliding, muscle remaking itself, and it left me on one knee in the cold, dragging air into lungs that felt too human. When I could stand, I took spare trousers from the hollow log where I kept them and pulled them on with hands that wouldn't stay steady. Night air raked across my bare chest. Usually I welcomed the quiet after a change. Tonight there was a girl ten steps away watching me do it, and I had never felt so exposed.

"You're him," she said. Her voice shook, but she held my eyes. "You're the wolf from my dreams."

Everything in me went rigid. "What dreams?"

"I've dreamed about you every night since I got here." A thin, cracked laugh. "I know how that sounds. But you were there, and you talked to me, and one morning there was a black hair on my fence. I don't know how I know it was you. I just do."

The hair was mine.

Four nights I had stood in the trees behind her house. I'd called it patrol. A stranger that was close to our border was a risk. Any Alpha would have checked, and checking only meant standing in the dark looking at a lit window. That was the story

I told myself until the second night, when I admitted I wasn't watching the border at all. I had learned the rhythm of her evenings from the lights going on and off, the kitchen, the stairs, the little yellow window under the eaves.

It was Odette Rose's house.

"Rose".

I'd known that. Of course, I had. But knowing it and letting myself think it were different things, and I had been very careful all week to stay on the right side of that line. Not when I first caught her scent two weeks ago. Not when Ethan told me a girl had moved into the old cottage and I said it was nothing.

"What's your name?" I asked, though I already knew.

"Liana. Liana Rose." She was searching my face. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cross the wall. It felt like something was pulling me and I couldn't . . ." She stopped. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."

I had. Ten years ago, my father died, and my mother with him, and I had been told it was the Roses' doing. A man named Rose, and his wife, Ione. I never saw their faces. I just carried the name around like a stone in my pocket and wore it smoothly, because hatred was something to hold when grief had no shape.

I remembered the funeral. The coffin that was almost too light. My mother's ring, the only thing they found of her.

And now the name had a face. It was standing in front of me, breathing, with Ione Rose's jaw. And my whole body was ringing like a struck bell because she was mine.

Hatred should have felt different. I knew hatred. It was cold and heavy and certain. This was hot and bright and made no sense, and the two things collided so hard inside me that I wanted to put my fist through the nearest tree.

"Do you know where you are?" It came out harder than I meant.

She blinked. "In the woods? Past the church?"

"This is Black Moon land. You're trespassing." I stepped toward her, and she flinched, and I hated that I had made her flinch. "No one crosses that wall. There's a sign. It's been there a hundred years."

Color rose in her cheeks. "I didn't see it. I'm sorry. I'll go."

"Yes," I said. "You will."

She turned. My wolf nearly tore out of my chest, wanting a roar, wanting me to call her back. Before I could think, my hand closed around her wrist.

Fire. It shot up my arm like lightning under the skin, and she gasped, and so did I. For one second neither of us could move. I let go at once. My palm still burned. Her eyes were huge. She had felt it too.

"What was that?" she whispered.

I should have lied. I'm good at it. I have lied to my pack, to my council, to my best friend, for seven years. Static. The cold. Nerves.

I looked at her mouth instead, and for one terrible second I forgot every reason I had.

"I'll walk you back," I said.

I told myself it was only to be sure she left. Walk her to the wall, watch her cross, and she would be the town's problem and not mine. It was perfectly logical. It was also the most transparent lie I'd told in years.

She studied me for a long moment. I don't know what she saw. "Okay," she said softly.

We walked in silence, three steps apart. It didn't help. I could feel her warmth beside me and hear her heartbeat, quick and uneven, keeping time with mine. The fiddle music drifted closer through the trees. Somewhere ahead, children were shrieking over candied apples, ordinary people with no idea what lived on the other side of their wall. I kept my eyes on the path, because every time I looked at her, my wolf pushed harder against my ribs.

Halfway there she asked my name, and I almost didn't answer.

"Kael Draven."

"Kael," she said, trying it out, and it was a mistake to let her. It sounded like something I'd been missing without knowing.

I knew what I had to do. At the wall, I would tell her to stay away from me, from my pack, from my land. I'd make her afraid, because fear would keep her safe from this. I only had to find a way to do it without letting her see what it cost me.