The Alpha Who Chose Me

Chapter 2: The Alpha Who Feels Nothing

Alpha Cassius's POV

"You're going to have to talk to him eventually," Finn said. "Contracts don't sign themselves."

I didn't look up from the map spread across my desk. "I'm aware of how contracts work, Finn."

"Could've fooled me. You've had this trade proposal from Thornridge for three weeks and you still haven't answered their last letter."

"Because something about it doesn't sit right."

Finn dropped into the chair across from me, the way he always did when he thought I was being difficult on purpose. Twenty years as my beta had made him comfortable enough to argue with me in a way almost no one else in Stonemere dared to.

"Everything doesn't sit right with you," he said. "That's not new information."

"This is different." I tapped the map, tracing the mountain pass that connected our territory to Thornridge's lowland borders. "Garrick's pack sits on the best steel routes in the region, and he's suddenly desperate enough to offer us triple the standard trade rate. Desperate men don't offer generous deals unless they need something worse than money."

"Or he actually wants peace between our packs."

"Garrick doesn't want peace. Garrick wants leverage." I sat back, rubbing a hand over my jaw. "I've heard things about how he runs that pack. Servants who disappear. Punishments that don't match the crime."

"Rumors travel faster than truth, Cassius. You taught me that yourself."

"I also taught you that where there's smoke on six separate borders, you don't wait around to see the fire." I pushed the map toward him. "Trade routes through Thornridge would cut our winter shipping time in half. I'm not blind to what this deal is worth. I just refuse to build Stonemere's future on another pack's suffering."

Finn leaned back, studying me the way he did when he was deciding whether to push further. "That's not like you. Since when do you care what happens inside another Alpha's walls?"

"Since always," I said. "I just don't advertise it the way some Alphas do."

"You've heard rumors."

"I've heard the same rumor from six different sources who've never met each other."

Finn was quiet for a moment. He was the only one in Stonemere who knew exactly how deep my instinct for reading dangerous men ran, because he'd been standing beside me the night my own instincts had failed catastrophically. Five years ago, in front of the entire pack, my first intended mate had rejected the bond in the cruelest way possible, choosing another Alpha's son in the middle of what should have been our binding ceremony. I still remembered the exact sound the hall had gone — two hundred wolves holding their breath at once — right before she said the words that ended it in front of everyone I was supposed to lead. I still carried the scar on my forearm from where my own claws had dug in, holding myself back from a rage that would have destroyed everything I'd built.

I hadn't trusted anything since. Not my instincts, not affection, not the mate bond itself. Especially not the mate bond. I had rebuilt my entire life around the idea that discipline was the only thing that couldn't humiliate you in front of a room full of people who would remember it forever.

Finn had never once brought it up unless I did first. It was, I suspected, the only reason our friendship had survived five years of me refusing to talk about anything that actually mattered.

"So what do we do?" Finn asked. "Turn down the best trade deal this pack has seen in a decade because of a bad feeling?"

"No," I said. "We go see for ourselves."

Finn raised an eyebrow. "You. Personally."

"I'm not signing anything I haven't inspected with my own eyes. If Garrick's pack is being run the way I think it is, I want to know before Stonemere's name is attached to his in any legal document."

"And if it's fine? If it's just a paranoid Alpha seeing monsters where there aren't any?"

"Then we sign the contract, and you never let me hear the end of it."

That earned a small, tired smile from him. Finn had watched me build Stonemere into the strongest territory in the region over the last five years, brick by brick, rule by rule, because building something solid was easier than trusting anything soft. My pack respected me. Some of them, I think, even feared me a little, in the way you fear a mountain — not because it means you harm, but because it could crush you without even noticing you were there.

I preferred it that way. Fear didn't lie to you. Fear didn't smile at your binding ceremony and then walk away with someone else.

"I'll arrange the travel," Finn said, standing. "Six days. We'll take a small escort, keep it low-profile."

"Good."

He paused at the door. "Cassius."

"What."

"Whatever you find there — try not to start a war over it before we've even signed anything."

"No promises," I said, and meant it.

That night, I stood on the balcony outside my study, looking out over the dark shapes of the mountains that made up my territory. Somewhere below, my pack slept peacefully, protected by rules I had built specifically so that no one under my protection would ever have to know the particular kind of fear that came from loving someone who could destroy you with a single word.

I had built those rules brick by brick over five years. No Alpha in Stonemere's history had ever run a tighter household, a fairer court, a more disciplined guard. My people didn't fear me the way Thornridge's servants apparently feared Garrick. They respected me the way you respect something solid enough to survive a storm. That had always been enough. It had to be enough, because the alternative — needing someone the way I'd once needed her, the way that had ended with my own claws tearing into my own arm in front of everyone I loved — wasn't a risk I intended to take twice.

I told myself the trip to Thornridge was strategy. Business. A precaution any responsible Alpha would take before signing an agreement that could shape trade routes for the next twenty years.

I didn't let myself consider that some small, buried part of me — the part I'd spent five years trying to bury under duty and discipline — had gone unusually restless the moment Finn first mentioned Thornridge's name. My wolf, usually silent and controlled, had paced beneath my skin all evening like he was waiting for something.

I dismissed it as instinct about Garrick. A warning about the kind of man I was about to meet.

I was wrong about what it meant. I wouldn't understand how wrong until six days later, standing in a lowland dining hall, when a servant girl with tired eyes and a steel collar around her throat walked past me carrying a pitcher of water — and my wolf came roaring to the surface for the first time in five years, screaming a single word I hadn't let myself believe in since the night of my rejection.

Mate.

But that was six days away. Tonight, I only knew that something about this trip mattered more than trade routes, and I intended to find out exactly what, whether Garrick wanted me to or not.