The Demon Alpha's Bride

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven – The Pull of the Bond

Aurora thought she was finally getting back to normal.

A week of school had passed without disaster. The odd new staff and strangers around the edges of her life were unsettling, but she had convinced herself they were nothing. Just bad luck, just her nerves. She laughed with her friends again, finished her homework, even let herself daydream about the future like she used to.

But then the dreams started.

At first, they were hazy things—shadows stretching across endless forests, a deep growl echoing through the night, golden eyes flickering in the dark. She would wake with her sheets tangled around her legs, heart pounding, skin clammy with sweat.

By the third night, she wasn’t sure she’d slept at all. She’d close her eyes only to feel him there. Not in body. Not in face. But in sensation: heat brushing against her skin, a breath against her neck, a whisper she couldn’t quite hear.

And during the day, it got worse.

In class, her chest would tighten for no reason, her pulse racing so fast she had to grip her desk to steady herself. In the cafeteria, the sound of laughter would suddenly fade, replaced by the echo of her own heartbeat in her ears. When she walked home, the wind carried a scent—smoke and cedar, sharp and wild—that vanished as quickly as it came.

Aurora didn’t tell her mother. She didn’t tell her classmates. She tried to laugh it off with her three closest friends, but whenever she did, they just went quiet.

Once, Elara reached for her hand under the table, squeezing gently, her eyes shimmering with something almost like pity.

Aurora had pulled away. She didn’t need pity. She needed answers.

But none came.

And far away, answers were unraveling into chaos.

The Demon Alpha had stopped sleeping. His mansion echoed with his pacing steps, his roars of fury, his pack scattering like leaves before a storm whenever he entered the room.

He could feel her.

The bond was a living thing, clawing through his chest, searing his blood. When she dreamed, he stirred. When her heart raced, his body answered. When her skin heated with invisible fire, his hands curled into fists, desperate to touch.

It was torment. Exquisite, unbearable torment.

He slammed his fist into the wall, stone cracking under the force. “She runs from me even in her sleep,” he growled, his voice ragged. “Do you hear me? She dares to run.”

His beta knelt at his feet, head bowed, though his voice shook when he spoke. “Alpha, perhaps it is the bond—”

“Don’t speak of it like it’s a curse,” the Alpha snapped, eyes glowing molten. “This bond is mine to command. She is mine.”

Yet even as he said it, the truth gnawed at him. The bond was not his to command. It was wild, merciless, binding him to the fragile human who had looked at him with fear and fled into the night.

And the more she resisted, the stronger it pulled.

“Find her,” he snarled. “Not to take her—not yet. But I want her scent on the wind, her shadow on every report. I want her so close I can hear her breathe.”

The beta swallowed hard. “Yes, Demon Alpha.”

The title echoed through the chamber, a reminder of why he bore it. Not only because of the curse that blackened his blood, but because no Alpha before him had ever burned so fiercely, loved so violently, destroyed so completely. His pack whispered that he was touched by hell itself.

Perhaps they were right.

But hell had never felt so sweet as the thought of her in his arms.

Back in her room, Aurora tossed and turned, clutching her pillow as if it could shield her. Her heart raced without reason, her skin alive with a fire she didn’t understand.

In the dead of night, her lips parted around a whisper she didn’t mean to speak.

“Who are you?”

And in the distant dark, the Demon Alpha froze, breath catching, as if her voice had brushed directly against his soul.

His claws sank into the arm of his chair, his body trembling with the effort to stay where he was. She didn’t even know his name. She didn’t know the word mate.

But she would.

Soon.