Claimed by my Possessive Alpha: A Dream Walkers Prey

Chapter 4: Meeting the Ruthless Alpha

Lirael’s POV.

I smelled him before I saw him. Rain, and something colder underneath it that made every wolf in my escort go quiet without anyone telling them to. Kaelric Ashdown didn't need an introduction. His scent was already doing the work.

The convoy had gone quiet an hour before we crossed the border. Even my own escort, four wolves my stepmother trusted enough to send with me, stopped talking once the trees changed. The air itself felt different on Ashdown land; heavier, like something was always listening.

"We're not far now," the driver said, though nobody had asked.

One of my guards, a broad-shouldered man named Petrus, kept his hand near his belt the whole ride, eyes on the tree line. "Territory's crawling with his people. Don't expect a welcome party."

We didn't get one. What we got was worse.

The convoy slowed near a clearing off the main road, and Petrus swore under his breath. Through the trees I could see figures, a dozen or more, standing in a loose circle around something on the ground. The driver pulled us to a stop without being told.

"Stay in the carriage," Petrus said.

I didn't listen. I climbed halfway out, staying low behind the door, close enough to see what they were all watching.

The scent of blood hit me fast. A man knelt in the mud at the center of the circle, stripped to the waist, blood at his mouth. And standing over him, arms loose at his sides like violence cost him nothing at all, was a man I didn't need anyone to introduce.

"You're going to tell me who sent you," Kaelric said. His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Or I'm going to ask your hands instead of your mouth, and hands don't lie as well."

The kneeling man said something I couldn't hear. Kaelric crouched, unhurried, and gripped the man's jaw, tilting his face up like he was inspecting livestock.

"Wrong answer."

I didn't see what happened next. I heard it… a short, ugly sound, and the man's scream cut off into something wet and choked. My stomach turned, and I made myself watch anyway, because looking away felt like a weakness I couldn't afford to show, even hidden behind a carriage door forty feet from a man I hadn't met yet.

Petrus pulled me back down. "I said stay inside."

My hands weren't steady when I found the edge of the carriage seat, though my voice was. "I saw him."

"Then you saw what he does to spies." He glanced at the clearing, jaw tight. "Pray you never see what he does to enemies."

***

We were meant to bypass him entirely, take the east road around to the estate while he finished whatever business had called him to the border. That was the plan, at least, until one of his men jogged over to our convoy and said four words that changed it.

"Alpha wants to see."

Petrus didn't like it. I could tell by the way his hand went to his belt again, like that would matter against a syndicate that had just made a man scream into the mud. But there wasn't a version of this where we said no, so the carriage rolled forward instead of around, and I straightened my spine and reminded myself of everything Garrick had told me in the training yard.

Ashdown wolves respect strength, not sweetness.

Kaelric was already turned toward us when we stopped. Someone had thrown a cloth over the man in the mud. I didn't look to see if he was breathing. Kaelric's shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, his hands red, and none of it seemed to register on his face as anything worth acknowledging.

He walked to the carriage himself. Didn't send a man to fetch me. Came himself, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and every right to take it.

Up close, he was worse than the rumors. Not because he looked cruel…He didn't, not exactly. He looked like a man who'd simply stopped needing to perform anything for anyone, cruelty included. His eyes moved over me once, assessing, the way you'd check a blade for flaws before deciding whether to trust it in your hand.

"Lirael Thorne." Not a question either.

"Kaelric Ashdown." I made myself hold his gaze instead of glancing at the covered shape behind him.

Something flickered across his face, not quite surprise, but close to it. "You didn't flinch."

"Should I have?"

"Most people do." He studied me another moment, unhurried, like I was a puzzle he hadn't decided was worth solving yet. "I expected a girl who cried the whole way here. Mourning the stepbrother she left behind."

The words landed exactly where he meant them to, and for one hot second I forgot every piece of advice Garrick had given me about composure.

"You don't know anything about what I left behind."

"I know you spent the ride from the border with your jaw so tight I could hear your teeth grinding from twenty feet." His voice stayed flat, almost bored, which made it worse. "I know grief when I smell it, Lirael. It doesn't wash off just because you put on a straight face for my men."

"And I know a man who interrogates strangers in the mud before he's even shaken his bride's hand." I didn't let my voice shake. "So maybe we're both walking in here with things the other one doesn't need to comment on."

For a second, nobody around us moved. Petrus had gone very still in his seat. One of Kaelric's own men shifted his weight like he expected something to happen.

Then, low and almost involuntary, something that wasn't quite a laugh moved through Kaelric's chest.

"Fair," he said.

***

He didn't send me on with an escort. He got into the carriage himself, dismissing the driver with two words and taking the reins in his own bloodied hands, and I heard the murmur that went through his men at that; low, surprised, the kind of reaction that told me this wasn't something he did.

"Your men don't seem used to this," I said.

"They're not." He didn't elaborate, and I didn't ask him to.

We rode in silence for a while, the estate rising ahead of us through the trees; dark stone, high walls, more like a fortress than a home. I studied it instead of him, because looking at him too long felt like standing too close to a fire that hadn't decided yet whether to warm you or burn you down.

"Why the border," I said finally. "Why today, of all days."

"Because a spy crossed onto my land the same week I'm meant to marry a woman from a pack that just survived an attack no one's claimed." He didn't look at me when he said it. "I don't believe in coincidence. Not with a wedding this convenient to disrupt."

"You think it's connected. To me. To my father's pack."

"I think somebody wants us at each other's throats before the ink is dry on this alliance." A muscle worked in his jaw. "And I think you should be more concerned about who's arranging it than about a man I put on his knees this morning."

I filed that away, the way Maren's mention of the border attack still sat unanswered somewhere in my chest.

"Why did you write me the letter," I asked, before I could decide it was a bad idea. "You could have said nothing. Let me find out what kind of man you were the day I arrived."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer.

"Because I've watched enough political marriages start with a lie." His eyes flicked to me, then back to the road. "I didn't want to be another one."

"That's not really an answer to my question."

"No." Something almost like discomfort crossed his face, gone as fast as it came. "What did your father used to call you, before all this? Not Lirael. Something else."

The question caught me off guard, mostly because it had nothing to do with packs or politics or the border attack. For a second I saw something almost human behind his eyes. Curiosity, maybe, or the ghost of it.

"Lira," I said. "He called me Lira."

Kaelric's jaw tightened, like he regretted asking the second the word left me. He didn't say anything else, just turned his focus back to the road, and I understood, without him needing to explain it, that I'd been given a glimpse of something he hadn't meant to show me.

The gates of the keep rose ahead of us, iron-black and taller than anything I'd seen in Nocturne City, and for a moment I let myself think that maybe, just maybe this wouldn't be the nightmare everyone had warned me it would be.

Then I saw her.

A woman stood on the estate steps, waiting, dressed like she'd been expecting us for hours. She smiled the second her eyes found mine. Not a welcome, not quite a threat either, but something colder than both. Like she already knew exactly how this ended, and found it entertaining that I didn't.

Kaelric's hands went tight on the reins beside me.

"Aveline," he said, and there was nothing warm in the way he said her name either.