The Alpha's Unwilling Mate

Ten Minutes of Mercy

Chapter 15: Ten Minutes of Mercy

POV: Lina Hale

The crown sat on the vanity looking less like power and more like something salvaged from a wreck. My head ached where it had pressed for hours. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the static still running through my blood from the marking. That collision of pulses had left me feeling stripped down, like something with its covering pulled off.

I heard the boots in the hallway before the knock came. My heart didn't jump. It settled into something low and careful. I knew that scent before the door moved.

Cedar and cold.

"Enter," I said, standing by the fireplace.

Kael came in. He had taken off the ceremonial furs. Dark leather tunic, nothing ceremonial about him now, just the sheer size of him and the way he moved through a room like he owned the air in it. His eyes went to my wrist for a half second before coming back up.

"The coronation was successful," he said. "The pack is settled."

"Good," I said.

He moved further into the room and stopped at a distance that wasn't respect. It was a boundary. "I came to make the terms of our arrangement clear. Today was about the law and the blood bond of the pack. It was not about anything else."

I waited.

"You have your own quarters. I have mine. We appear together for ceremonies, rituals, and council. You fulfill your duties as Luna. Behind these doors we are strangers. I expect nothing beyond the performance of your role and you should expect nothing beyond mine."

He stopped. Waiting, I realized, for what the old Selene would have done. Tears, probably. Pleading. Some version of reaching for him.

I let out a long slow breath.

"Thank you," I said.

Kael went still. His brows pulled together. "Thank you?"

"I don't remember the man you were to me," I said, resting one hand on the stone mantle. The memory loss cover was the frame but what came next was all me. "What I see now is a King carrying more than any one person should. I have enough weight in my own head right now. I don't need a husband I have to perform for in private. If we can be partners in a difficult situation and leave it at that, I can work with that."

The silence that followed was complete.

He stared at me like I had said something in a language he didn't have. I had spoken to him like someone negotiating terms, not someone hoping to be chosen. The script he had walked in with was gone and he had nothing to replace it with.

He turned toward the door. His movements were slightly off, not quite the fluid precision I had seen from him before.

"Rest," he said, his back to me. "The first shift blessing is in five days. Don't make me regret today."

The door clicked shut behind him.

I stood still until his footsteps faded all the way down the corridor. Then I crossed the room and turned the iron bolt.

The silence came in hard and cold.

I didn't make it to the bed. I made it as far as the floor, my back against the bedframe, knees pulled up. I looked at my hands. The pale perfect hands that had never washed a dish or taken a double shift or hidden three hundred dollars inside a dictionary. They were shaking.

Then it hit me.

All of it at once.

The terror of being trapped in a world I hadn't chosen, in a body I hadn't asked for, surrounded by creatures who could smell a lie. The grief for the apartment I had complained about every single day. The cheap coffee and the sound of city sirens and the beautiful ordinary fact that nobody had ever needed me to be anything but a waitress who showed up on time. I missed being invisible. I missed being small enough that the world didn't notice me.

A sob came up out of my chest, rough and ugly.

I reached over and turned the small hourglass on the nightstand. Mira had pointed it out during the tour, a decorative thing, red sand, narrow neck.

Ten minutes.

I gave myself ten minutes and I used all of them. I cried loud and messy and didn't try to stop it. I grieved for the real Selene, who was probably at the bottom of the sacred river because someone who was supposed to love her had put her there. I grieved for Lina, the version of me that had existed before the jump. I let the weight of the healings and the blessings and the pack bond and the crown press down until I was flat on the rug and couldn't breathe right.

I was a fraud. I was a ghost. I was one wrong move from being torn apart.

The sand kept falling.

I watched the last few grains go through.

When the hourglass emptied I stopped. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and made my lungs work properly again.

I got up. I went to the washbasin and put cold water on my face until the heat was gone. I looked in the mirror. Eyes red. But clear.

Ten minutes was all I was getting. I couldn't afford an eleventh.

I walked to the window and pushed it open. The night air came in sharp and cold. The palace sat high on a ridge above a sea of dark pines running all the way to the mountains.

A howl broke the quiet somewhere out in the trees. Long and low, rising and falling with the wind. Then another joined it. Then a third. The patrol calling to the moon.

I waited for the fear. The human reflex to go small when predators made noise.

It didn't come.

Instead, something moved in my chest. Deep behind my ribs, right where the slow heartbeat lived. A vibration that matched the frequency of the howls without me doing anything to make it happen. It wasn't my instinct. It wasn't my memory. It was the body recognizing something that belonged to it.

Not a threat. An echo.

I gripped the windowsill and held on.

For the first time since I had woken up in this room I didn't feel like someone wearing the wrong clothes. I felt the thread of the pack bond, faint but real, running from my chest outward into the dark.

I wasn't the girl from the city anymore. That person had hit the water and not come back up.

I wasn't the old Selene either. She was gone too.

Whatever I was now was built from both of them. Human survival instinct in a body that ran on something older and stronger.

I can do this, I thought, listening to the last howl fade into the trees.

I just have to be the most dangerous thing in the room before anyone figures out what I actually am.

I closed the window and walked back to the vanity. I picked up the crown.

It didn't feel like scrap metal anymore.

It felt like something I could use.