The Alpha's Unwilling Mate

Unnamed Current

Chapter 16: The Unnamed Current

POV: Kael Draven

Moonlight lay across the floor of my study in a wide pale stripe. Outside, the night circuit was running. I could feel it through the stone under my feet, hundreds of wolves moving in a steady tide across the borderlands, their collective presence a single pulse of territory and identity. I usually ran in front of it.

Tonight I stood at the window and watched them go.

My wolf was pacing hard at the back of my mind, dragging its claws against every attempt I made to stay still. I should have been out there. Paws on the dirt, lungs burning, the noise of the pack drowning out everything else. But I couldn't move. Something had lodged itself in my chest during the coronation and hadn't shifted since.

I watched the last of the patrol disappear into the tree line below.

My mind went back to the dais. It had done nothing else since sundown.

I looked at my right wrist. The skin looked the same. Underneath it, the nerves still felt like something had burned through them. As Alpha my bond sense is the sharpest in the territory. I am the center point where every thread of the pack's loyalty meets. When I mark a Luna I know what to expect. A circuit completing. A warmth that spreads from the contact point outward, telling me the woman beside me is an extension of the pack's soul and mine.

What I had felt when I touched her was not that.

It was like pushing my hand into a live current. Raw and ancient and completely uninterested in the shape of the ritual around it. It didn't carry the soft lavender submission I had associated with Selene for twenty years. It was gritty and unrefined and vast in a way I had no framework for. It didn't feel like a bond completing. It felt like something pushing back.

My wolf made a low sound. Even the animal, which reduced everything to simple categories, had no name for what it had encountered. Not mate. Not an enemy. Something else entirely. A frequency I had never heard before in all my years of running this pack.

I turned from the window and started pacing.

The restlessness had become physical, an ache that moved through my whole body. I thought about her face in the chamber tonight. Level and direct, no trace of the reaching softness I had expected. She had thanked me for separate quarters like I had handed her exactly what she wanted. The memory loss covered her inconsistencies on the surface but it didn't reach far enough. Amnesia takes your history. It doesn't change how your heart behaves when an Alpha walks into the room. It doesn't retain a scent that has been anxious for ten years.

It doesn't turn a submissive wolf into something that stands square and speaks like it has nothing to lose.

I picked up the obsidian paperweight from my desk and gripped it until the edge bit into my palm. I hated this. My entire life had been built on certainty. I knew my borders. I knew my threats. I knew every c***k in my council. But the woman sleeping three halls away was something I couldn't read and I had already bound myself to her wrist.

If the marking had taken the way it should have I would be able to feel her now. A low peripheral hum of her presence, her mood, the edges of her thoughts. When I reached out with my mind I found nothing but static. A wall. Either she was shielded by something or the bridge between us had been built out of material I didn't recognize.

"What are you?" I said to the empty room.

The distant howl of a perimeter wolf came back. Nothing else.

The duty of the King is to protect the pack from what it doesn't understand. Usually that means the shadow packs or the winter stores or the political maneuvering of neighboring Alphas. Now the unknown was wearing Luna's crown. It was sitting at my table. It was tied to my wrist.

I couldn't stay in this room.

I walked to the private balcony above the eastern cliff and pulled off my tunic. The air hit my skin and I let it. I didn't call for anyone. I didn't leave word for Riven.

I took one breath of pine and cold and coming snow and pushed her steady blue eyes out of my mind. Pushed the memory of the shock. Pushed all of it down.

I shifted.

The transition was brutal and fast the way it always was. Bones broke and reset. Muscle tore and closed. My senses hit me all at once, the world going from flat grey to layered and vivid and immediate.

I jumped from the balcony without waiting. My claws caught the cliff stone for a fraction of a second before I hit the ground forty feet below and came up running.

I didn't take the patrol routes. I headed north toward the hardest terrain on the territory, the vertical rock and frozen streams along the upper border where the ground fought back. I pushed until my heart was hammering and the only things that existed were my paws and the frozen air moving through my fur.

I would run until the wolf was too tired to circle back to the question.

I was the Alpha King. I would find the logic underneath the dissonance. If the woman I had bound myself to turned out to be a threat I would handle it the same way I handled every other threat to my borders.

But when I crested the highest ridge and the full face of the moon opened up above the pines, that current moved through my blood again. Faint. Electric. A ghost of her pulse against mine.

I threw my head back and let out a sound that shook the trees below.

The King was in control.

But it was the first time in my life I wasn't completely sure that was true.