ALPHA'S REGRET His Fated Human Luna

Chapter 2 The Kiss I Didn't Choose

Callum's POV

Her mouth tastes wrong.

That is the first clean thought that cuts through the fog—sharp enough to sever bone. Celeste Maren's lips are on mine. Her fingers are buried in my hair. My hands are on her waist, pinning her to my study desk like I put her there on purpose.

I did not.

I shove her back hard enough that her spine hits the wood with a soft sound. My wolf surges under my skin, confused, hungry, wrong. The mate bond she has been hunting for months flares between us like a wire pulled too tight.

"Callum," she starts, breathy, triumphant.

"Don't." My voice scrapes. "Don't say my name like that."

The room smells like her perfume twisted into mine—rain-wet stone, bitter orange leaf. Under it, something chemical.

Sweet.

Wrong.

My tongue feels thick. My pulse is too loud.

Tonight I was supposed to reject her. Cut the bond. Not kiss her.

Celeste faces me and touches the fresh red near her throat like a trophy, eyes bright. "You felt it. Don't pretend you didn't. I'm your fated mate. Your father knows it. Everyone in the packs knows it. That human—"

My gaze locks on the mark she wants the world to see. Red. New. Wet enough to photograph.

My heart skips. I check my own body.

No answering burn. No seal. Nothing locked.

Whatever that red is—kiss-bruise, teeth theater—it is not a completed mate mark.

"My wife," I snarl. "Say her name wrong again and we have a different problem."

"Paige." Celeste tastes the word like spoiled fruit. "She doesn't belong in our world. You know that."

"I chose her."

"And fate chose me." She steps closer. "You were saying the rejection. Then you stopped. Your wolf stopped. What does that mean, Callum? Why fight what the Moon Goddess already set in stone?"

Why?

The question hits empty space where minutes should be. Where a finished claim should have locked. Blank.

I turn away before I do something worse than shove her. The study door is half open. Night air slides in from the hallway. Under Celeste's sweetness I catch soap, coffee, leather cleaner—scents that do not belong here at this hour.

And Paige's scent is gone.

Paige was here?

Did she see?

My stomach drops.

"Get out," I tell Celeste.

"We need to talk—"

"Out." Alpha command rides the word. She flinches, then recovers with a wounded look practiced enough to sell tickets. I ignore it. "We'll finish this another time."

"We already started something," Celeste murmurs, fingers brushing that red again, and slips past me like smoke.

I don't watch her leave.

I dig my phone out with hands that will not stop shaking.

Paige.

It rings.

And rings.

Then voicemail—her calm clinic voice telling callers she will get back to them as soon as she can.

I call again.

Nothing.

"Pick up," I whisper into the dead line. "Please. Just pick up."

Two years ago, Soren left his dog at my place while he ran pack business out of town. Ordinary dog. Soft ears. No wolf under the skin. The kind pack doctors look past like furniture.

The dog blew out a foreleg chasing a frisbee in my yard. Bad tear. Bleeding. Screaming in that thin animal way that scrapes your teeth.

I called the pack clinic first. Habit.

The healer on the line laughed. "It's a dog, Alpha-heir. Not pack. Not worth the serum. Put it down or find a human."

Soren was hours away. The dog was shaking in my arms.

So I drove to a clinic on the edge of the human city, jaw locked, pride swallowed.

The woman who opened the exam-room door smelled like antiseptic and clean cotton. Dark hair tied up. Eyes that measured me the way she measured a wound—fast, honest, no worship.

"Put him on the table," she said. "And stop glaring. I don't bite. Question is, does he?"

"Only people who deserve it," I said through my teeth.

"Then behave," she said, already gloving up. "Both of you."

She worked like the dog mattered. Stabilized. Cleaned. Explained the tear without dressing it up. Never asked why an expensive man in a ruined shirt was carrying someone else's pet at midnight. Just worked.

When she looked up at me, something in my chest locked.

Mine.

Not polite want. The kind that says: this one. No other.

"Name?" I asked, rough.

"Paige Winslow." She arched a brow. "Do you always interrogate the vet, or am I special?"

"You're special," I said, before I could stop myself.

She snorted. "Bad line. Try again when you bring him back for the recheck."

I did.

And the appointment after that.

Coffee became dinner. Dinner became the first night she fell asleep against my shoulder. My wolf went quiet for the first time in years.

My father, Aldric Drayton, called Paige a weakness over whiskey that tasted like old oak and older prejudice.

"She's human," he said. "She will break. Or she will break you. Reject the Maren girl and you spit on fate and on two packs at once. Is one soft mouth worth that price?"

"Yes," I answered.

He slammed the glass down. "Then don't come begging when the bond tears you open and the pack casts you out."

The elders called Paige a liability.

Celeste's father called her an insult.

I married Paige in a courthouse anyway. She didn't need my family's blessing. She needed me. I refused to wait for permission I was never going to get.

"You sure?" she whispered before the clerk. "It's really okay if your family doesn't come?"

"I love you," I said. "That's the only vote that counts."

She smiled, bright as a cut. "Then say I do like you mean it."

I did.

Tonight was supposed to finish the other half of that fight.

I told Celeste to meet me at the downtown office after hours. Reject her clean. Public enough her pack couldn't twist it. Private enough Paige never had to hear mate spit like a claim.

Celeste never showed. Never answered.

I went home. Ate dinner with Paige like any other night.

Then her message arrived. She could come.

So I brought the rejection into my study.

I wanted children with Paige. I would not do that with another woman's bond still hooked in my ribs.

Oak shelves. Rain on the windows. Celeste walked in and closed the distance like she owned the air.

"Didn't think you'd call me to your house," she said, perched on my desk edge.

"I can't wait to belong to my wife." I shoved her back. Desk between us. "Celeste. I called you here to end this."

Her smile did not move. "End what? The inevitable?"

"The bond." Alpha bled into the words. "I choose my wife. I reject you as mate. I reject any claim—"

She drifted closer. "Your mouth says reject. Your wolf doesn't."

"Stay back."

"Make me." Soft laugh. Breath on my jaw. "Or admit you're tired of pretending a human can hold what an Alpha needs."

When did she get that close again?

"I said—"

Then nothing.

Not darkness. Not sleep. A smear. Minutes wiped clean. The chemical sweetness under her perfume floods back late, sticky as guilt.

Drug.

A bond yanked too hard on purpose.

Five minutes after Celeste leaves, I am calling Paige—no answer—and storming our room.

Empty.

"Paige?" My voice cracks down the hallway. "Paige!"

No answer.

Her sneakers are gone.

Her go-bag—the ugly emergency one Greg Winslow made her keep—is gone.

Bathroom light still on. A torn pregnancy-test box in the trash. No stick.

She took it.

Positive.

The word lands harder than Celeste's mouth.

Pregnant.

Ours.

I grip the counter until marble complains. Temples spike like needles. My wolf howls inside my skull—find her—and every instinct I own swings toward the driveway as I dial Soren.

He answers on the first ring.

"Alpha?"

"Where is Paige?"

"She left about twenty minutes ago. Said she was going shopping. Forgot something at the mall."

"Shopping." I laugh once, ugly. "At this hour? With a go-bag?"

"She seemed normal," Soren says, then pauses like the wrong note just hit. "Smiled. Called my name. A little pale, but—Callum, if I'd blocked her, she'd have asked why. I didn't have an answer that wouldn't expose us."

"Expose us?" The growl rips free. "My pregnant wife just walked out of a house where another woman called me her Alpha mate. Exposure is the least of our problems. Did you smell fear on her?"

Silence. Then quieter: "Yes. She hid it well. Better than most humans."

"Track her phone. Plate. Cameras. Everything."

"Already on it. Signal jumped toward the highway. Airport corridor."

Airport.

My blood goes cold.

"Meet me there," I order. "If Celeste contacts you, tell her nothing."

"Understood."

I am in the SUV before the next breath. Night trees whip past. Rain-wet stone and bitter orange leaf pour off my skin so thick with panic I taste it.

I call Paige again.

Voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

"Please," I mutter. "Yell at me. Hate me. Hit me. Just answer."

Flashes I don't deserve—Paige in a white coat. Paige treating a torn dog like it deserved the table. Paige laughing at jokes I had just learned. Paige saying my family missing the wedding was fine. Paige kissing the corner of my mouth like I was safe.

My father said humans break.

Celeste said fate does not negotiate.

I told them both they were wrong.

Airport signs burn white in my headlights. My wife's phone dies to voicemail like she has already decided I am the danger.

I dump the car at departures. Soren is in my ear again, tracking gate cameras, arguing security language I do not have time for.

"Talk," I snap.

"She's airside," he says. "Or she was. No flight under her name. Someone bought the ticket. No trail. And Callum—her scent is muddied. Soap. Coffee. Cleaner when she left. She's masking."

Masking.

My human wife should not know how to muddy an Alpha's nose.

The terminal crowd parts around me. Under the soap and coffee I still catch the edge of fear—and under that, nothing clean enough to follow. Phone dead. Cameras chewed into blind spots. Too neat for a woman who just forgot something at the mall.

"Someone helped her," I say.

Soren's breath goes tight. "Or someone took her."

The thought hits like ice water.

Celeste walked out of my study smiling. Celeste knows what Paige saw—or close enough. Celeste has people who smile while they work. A human wife who just became inconvenient. A pregnancy stick missing from the trash. A scent trail scrubbed on purpose.

"Rogue," I hear myself say. "Or Celeste."

"Callum—"

"If a rogue pulled her out, they knew where to cut the trail." My throat burns. "If Celeste's people moved first, this isn't a fight. It's a k********g dressed as a disappearance."

"We don't know what she saw."

"I know." The words scrape. "I know exactly what it looked like."

Celeste's mouth. My hands. The red on her throat.

Not sealed. Not claimed.

Still enough to gut her.

And Paige did not scream.

She left—or she was taken before she could.

Pregnant. Quiet. Gone.

A flight board flips overhead. Cities I never took her to. Names that mean nothing except distance.

"Alpha. What's next," Soren says.

I stare until the letters blur.

"Find her," I say. "Before anyone else. Before Celeste's people finish whatever this is. Before my father decides a missing human wife is proof he was right."

"And if she doesn't want to be found?"

The question lands like a fist.

I chose Paige.

I still choose Paige.

The airport keeps swallowing people. None of them are her.

I scent the air until it burns. I still can't find her.

My phone stays dark in my hand.

No answer.

No location pin.

No soft lie about shopping.

Just the hollow fact settling into my bones like winter:

She is gone.