The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

Evan's POV She picks up on the second ring. "Hello?" My mother's voice is soft, already warm. She doesn't need me to say anything. She never has. "There you are." That's all it takes. Two words and something in my chest goes loose. She talks the way she always does, filling the quiet because she knows I never really have much to say. I could barely keep track of everything she was talking about. The garden, The pack gossip, Some newly mated wolves, and everything in between. I close my eyes and let it run over me, the phone warm against my ear, and for a few seconds the last three years just aren't there. "I've said it a hundred times." My father's voice cuts in behind hers. "He left for a reason. Don't contact him again." He doesn't bother getting loud. He never has, and just like that, the line dies. I sit there with the dial tone going against the side of my face and don't move for a while. I was the heir. That was the first thing I ever knew about myself, before my own name, basically. You're the heir, Evan. You have to be stronger than everyone, because one day you'll be Alpha King. He said it at dinner, in the training yard, every time I lost at anything. You don't argue with a sentence like that when you're six. You just try to get big enough to carry it. And I was strong. That part was never the problem. Silver wolf, faster than the others, harder to knock down and void of fear. For a while that was enough to make him look at me like he was proud, and I'd have done just about anything to keep that look on his face. Before I knew it my mind drifted off to the distant memory without giving me the time to brace myself for it. Josh across from me on the sparring ground. Seventeen, grinning, sweat in his hair. We'd fought a hundred times. It was the one thing we were allowed to do that felt like playing. He fakes left, I read it and we both laugh. Then his lip splits. It's nothing. Just a nick, I tell myself, as he wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist, still laughing, and in that moment, in a split second, it leaves me. I can't even tell you what happens next because I wasn't there for it. The blood hits the back of my throat and everything goes out at the edges, the sound first, then the rest. Something older than me takes over, and I go somewhere small and far off while it works. What I have is the after. Hands dragging me back, four of them, then more. My father's voice, not giving an order for once, just thin. And Josh on the ground, not moving right. Broken ribs. A spine they weren't sure about for a long time. He never blamed me. That's the part I can't seem to forget. He woke up and asked if I was okay when I beastly hospitalized him. I had to leave the room. After that the whole pack figured out a new way to go quiet when I walked in. The heir who couldn't be trusted to spar. My father buried the whole thing and told everyone not to talk about it, and that's when I understood I was worse than useless to them. An heir who can't control himself is more dangerous than no heir at all. So I left before anyone had to ask. New name. A school out at the edge of the human world, the kind that takes both our kinds and doesn't ask which you are. I told myself it was a choice. The dial tone is still going. I drop the phone on the railing and breathe until my eyes clear, because even thinking about that day can wake the wolf up now. The suppressants keep him down to a low hum. They've never actually shut him up. Nothing's happening tonight. Black water, black sky, the town a smear of yellow lights behind me. I can't sit still. My hands keep moving, the railing, my jacket, nothing. It's always like this after she calls and he hangs it up for her. Too much in me and nowhere to put it. The fishing boats bump against the dock in the swell. There's an empty one down the far end, dark and low and quiet, and I'm climbing onto it before I really decide to. The deck's cold through my shirt. I lie back. Stars I couldn't name if you paid me. Water slapping the hull, slow and even. For a while it's almost enough. Then the wind turns. It comes off the water carrying the whole night, salt and diesel and wet rope. And under all of that, something that has no business being out here in the cold. The wolf lifts his head. No. It's automatic, like throwing a hand out when you trip. Down. Not here. I've spent three years teaching him to listen to me, and I throw all of it at him now, telling him there's nothing, lie back down. He doesn't lie back down. He comes up slow, and the scent comes with him until it's the only thing left in the world. Warm skin with the sea still on it. Hair that dried in the sun. Something green underneath, cut grass, rain on a stone wall. And under that, something sweet I don't have a name for, that skips right past my head and lands somewhere a lot older. And that old part of me just aches. I've never felt him do this. It isn't hunger and it isn't the thing that took me on the sparring ground. It's worse, because it's soft. He leans toward the water like a plant leaning at a window, no pride in it at all, and every breath I take is me pulling more of her in and hating myself for it and not stopping. The sound starts in my chest before I can shut my throat on it. Low, sure, the one word he's been waiting my whole life to say. Mate. The howl rips out of me before I can stop it, way too loud. It rolls out over the black water, off the hulls, into the dark between the boats, and comes back to me thin and wrong. Then nothing. The kind of quiet that has weight to it. The kind that means somebody out there just stopped breathing to listen. She's out there. I don't know her name. I don't know her face. All I know is the wolf has gone still for the first time in three years, every part of him pointed out into the dark like he's finally found the one direction that matters. Who are you, I think, out toward whatever won't let go of me. And what am I supposed to do now that you're real? The answer's a sound. Not a voice. A slip, a scramble, the small panicked noise of someone losing their feet on a wet deck. Then the black water opens and closes over the spot where she went under.