ALPHA’S CURSED MATE

RUN AWAY

[Demo Pov]

“I asked a question father, please answer,” He sounded calm but impatient.

“It’s nothing, son.”

His eyes were filled with doubts, not the way a son should look at his father.

“It Doesn’t seem like nothing father.”

Aivy found a reason to leave the room, before any of us could say another word.

Ragnar closed the distance between us slowly, deliberately the way he did everything.

“I would appreciate it if you don't meet Aivy…” His voice was tight, mixed with irritation.“Doesn't speak well of you.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“You don't tell me what to do Ragnar,” I said. “Not in my own house… not ever.”

Something broke open behind his eyes unexplainable, the kind of wound that never properly heals.

I should've been relieved he didn't hear what me and Aivy had talked about but it was something worse.

“Mother was supposed to be enough for you.” His voice dropped. “And you couldn’t even protect her.”

The room shifted.

“Enough!” My voice came out quiet, which was worse than shouting. “Leave.”

We locked eyes for a while.

Then he turned.

One would think he was done.

He paused at the door, his whole body almost still, hand resting on the frame, his back still to me.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about mother,” he said. “Not once. And I will find out what happened whoever is behind it…” A beat of silence. “I really hope you’re not.”

“Go plan your wedding,” I said. “Stop looking for things that will only hurt you.”

He turned then, and the look on his face almost stopped me cold.

“There is no wedding.” His voice was flat. Decided. “I will never take a cursed mate. Have you forgotten what they did to us?”

He left before I could answer.

The quiet he left behind was the loud kind.

It all hit me at once as I stood, he was not totally wrong.

There had been a time when things were different. When the distance between our world and theirs wasn’t all about hate and blood.

Then Azura made his choices, and turned everything upside down.

[Nancy pov]

My hands hadn’t stopped shaking by the time I heard the knock.

I wouldn’t call it a knock, because whosoever was on the other side had already decided they were coming in regardless.

Aivy’s slap fell on my cheeks before I had fully registered she was in the room, for a moment I couldn’t do anything but stand there with my hand pressed to my face, eyes burning.

She slammed the door and looked at me the way you look at something you’ve already made up your mind about.

“You ignorant fool, I don't know were the hell you appeared from, but f**k off.” Her voice was steady and cold.

“I don't understand you,” I replied. My voice came out lower than I wanted.

“Shut the hell up, and drop the goddam act now.” She yelled and turned toward the door.

“Then help me leave...” I said, as soon as the idea struck my mind.

She paused.

When she turned back around, something had shifted in her expression a smirk. Like I’d finally said what she wanted to hear.

“All right,” she said simply. “I’ll get you out.”

Something loosened in my chest.

“The far gates. When it’s fully dark.”

“I don’t know my way around,” I quickly spoke out while she was already walking out.

“Find it,” She replied as she closed the door behind her like a period at the end of a sentence.

A Few hours later I slipped out of my room that night with my heart in my throat.

The environment was huge in the dark, somewhere I wouldn't want to be in the night, I will simply put as scary.

“How did you know the right gate?”

I spun around. Aivy was standing a few feet behind me, head slightly tilted, studying me with an expression I couldn’t read.

I didn’t have an answer that would make sense.

“Follow me,” she said.

We moved through the trees without speaking. The woods were thick and then suddenly they weren’t, and I recognized the road ahead the particular bend of it, the way the light fell.

“You know where you are?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me one last time. It wasn’t unkind, exactly. Just final.

“Don’t come back.”

I nodded. Hesitated.

“My stepmother will notice I was gone. Could you just tell her I was with you?

The look on her face stopped me.

“No.” Then, almost to herself “But I have a better idea.”

She smiled at some private thought and turned and walked back into the dark without another word.

My window had a broken latch that never caught properly. I’d hated it for months.

That night I loved it.

I climbed through and sank onto my bed and lay there staring at the ceiling while the whole night played back through my head in pieces that didn’t quite fit together.

Demo. Ragnar. Aivy. The woods. The gate that I’d somehow known.

I was still turning it over when my phone lit up on the nightstand.

I almost ignored it, days without my phone and I didn't even care.

Then I picked it up.

The email had arrived at 10:47 p.m. The sender line read Aurelian Crescent University Office of Admissions.

My hands went still.

I read it once. Then again, more slowly.

Accepted.

Department of Archaeology and Ancient Civilizations. New Orleans.

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

I had filled out that application on a quiet Sunday in February, alone, telling no one because I couldn’t afford to want it out loud. The program was small. Competitive. The kind of thing you applied to because you needed to believe, just briefly, that your life could look entirely different.

And now here it was.

No more of this house.

No more tiptoeing and sneaking in through the window and getting cracked skin.

I lay on my back and let out a breath of relief.

I remembered when I had applied for the scholarship just trying my luck not expecting to get it.

For the first time in longer than I could name, the future didn’t feel like something happening to me.

It felt like something I was finally moving toward.

But who would have thought it would be the beginning of a disaster?