MARKED BY THE ALPHA:THE ALPHA’S OBSESSION

3

Chapter Three

Three knocks. Slow. Deliberate.

"Sara." Caden's voice in my ear has dropped to something I have never heard from him before. Controlled but only barely. "Step away from the door. Right now."

I am already moving. My wolf is not screaming anymore. She has gone very quiet the way she goes quiet when the threat is real, when noise is a liability, when every sense needs to be pointed outward.

I press my back to the wall beside the door and I take stock. One exit behind me through the kitchen window onto the fire escape. My phone in my hand. A man on the other end of that phone who I do not trust and also apparently cannot stop calling.

"Who is it," I breathe.

"I do not know yet. I am four minutes away."

"You are four minutes away from my apartment at six in the morning."

"I never stopped watching your building, Sara."

I do not have time to process that. The knock comes again. Three more. Same rhythm. Patient. The knock of someone who is certain you are on the other side of the door and is equally certain you will eventually open it.

Then a voice.

"Sara Cole." Male. Flat. The particular flatness of someone who does not need to raise their voice because they have never had a reason to. "We know you are home. We are not here to hurt you. We are here to deliver a message from Elder Aldric Black."

The name lands in my chest like something thrown hard.

Aldric. Caden's father. The man who built the cage and handed his son the lock.

If what Caden told me on the phone is true.

If.

"Message received," I call through the door. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "You can go."

Silence. Then: "The Elder requests your presence at Blackmoon territory within forty-eight hours. He says to tell you the invitation is a courtesy. The next one will not be."

I stare at the door.

I hear Caden on the phone, very quiet, saying something to someone else. Then his voice comes back to me: "Do not engage. I am one minute out."

"Caden," I say.

"Yes."

"Your father just threatened me in my own hallway."

A pause. Short and sharp. "I know."

"So everything you told me."

"Yes."

One word. But the weight of it fills my whole apartment.

He arrives in fifty seconds, not sixty. I hear his voice in the hallway before I hear the other men leave and the shift in the air is immediate. Like a pressure change. Like the building itself recognizing something dominant has entered it.

I open the door.

There are two of them at the end of the corridor, already walking away. Big. Pack-built. They do not look back.

Caden is standing right in front of me.

He is in dark clothes, jacket open, and he has clearly not slept either. His eyes go over me once, head to toe, the way you check someone for damage before you check for anything else.

"Are you hurt," he says.

"They knocked on my door. I am not made of glass."

"That is not what I asked."

"No," I say. "I am not hurt."

He exhales. It is the first uncontrolled thing I have seen from him since he walked into the Blue Vein last night and it undoes something in me I was not prepared for. He drops his head for one second. Just one. Then he straightens and he is controlled again.

"We need to talk," he says.

"You think."

I do not let him in.

We stand in my doorway, me inside and him in the hall, which feels like the only boundary I have left and I am keeping it. He does not push. He leans against the opposite wall and crosses his arms and looks at me with those grey eyes and waits.

"Tell me all of it," I say. "Not the version you think I can handle. All of it."

He tells me.

It takes twelve minutes. I know because I watch the clock on my kitchen wall the entire time he speaks, because I need something steady to look at while my understanding of the last three years rearranges itself into a shape I do not recognize.

The arranged alliance. His father's deal with Mira's family, made when Caden was nineteen, before he even knew I existed as anything more than an Omega girl in his pack. The threat delivered three days before my birthday in the Alpha's private office: reject Sara publicly and completely, or she would be dead before the week was out.

"He had people," Caden says. "Men who were loyal to him specifically. Not to the pack. To him. He had been building that network for years. I was twenty-one and I had not consolidated my own position yet and I believed him." A beat. "I still believe he would have done it."

"So you decided for me," I say. "You decided my life was worth more than my choice."

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

"You were eighteen and you were in love with me and you would have told me to fight him and you would have died for it."

The words hit flat and accurate and I hate him for it because he is not wrong. That is exactly what I would have done. I was eighteen and I was furious and I had never once in my life backed down from anything and I would have walked straight into Aldric Black's threat without blinking.

"You do not get to make that choice for me," I say anyway. Because it is still true.

"I know," he says. "I have known it for three years."

I look at him. Really look. At the scar by his eyebrow I do not recognize. At the shadows under his eyes. At the way he is holding himself with a steadiness that costs him something.

"Why did it take you two years to find me," I say.

"Because my father still had enough control of pack communications that any search I ran went through people loyal to him. I had to dismantle that first. Quietly. Without tipping him off that I was looking."

"And now."

"And now he knows I found you. Which is why he sent those men this morning."

I lean against my doorframe. My wolf has been quiet through this whole conversation but I can feel her listening. Evaluating. She was always smarter than me about him. I trusted her instincts before I trusted my own and look where that got us.

"What does he want," I say. "Actually want. Not the message he sent."

Something shifts behind Caden's eyes. He looks at me for a moment like he is deciding something.

"You," he says. "He has always wanted you. I just did not understand why until six months ago."

"And now you understand why."

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me."

He pushes off the wall. He takes one step toward me and stops, like he is very aware of the boundary I drew. His voice drops.

"Not here. Not where his men can still be listening." His eyes hold mine. "Come back with me, Sara. Come to Blackmoon. Let me show you everything and keep you safe while I do it. Your brother is there."

Everything in me stops.

"What," I say.

"Jasper." Something careful in his face now. "He came to Blackmoon four days ago. He said he had information I needed to hear. He has been asking me to find you ever since." A pause. "He is fine. He is safe. But he will not tell me what he knows until you are there."

I stare at him.

My brother, who went rogue the same night I did. My brother, who I have not seen in fourteen months because we both agreed distance was the only thing keeping us both alive.

My brother walked into Blackmoon territory four days ago and did not tell me.

"What does Jasper know," I say.

Caden looks at me and for the first time since he walked back into my life he looks something close to afraid.

"He knows what my father did the night before your birthday," he says. "And Sara, if he is right, everything you think you know about that night is only half the story."