The pulling
848 Words
Two weeks later.
---
The announcement was scheduled for sunset.
Kael stood before his mirror, adjusting his collar, and felt nothing. That was the goal.
That had always been the goal. Serena would stand beside him, beautiful and vacant, and the pack would cheer, and the Beta's loyalty would be cemented, and Kael would spend the rest of his life in a marriage that tasted like ash.
Not her, he reminded himself. Anyone but her.
But every night for fourteen nights, he'd dreamed of silver eyes.
Not Serena's honey-brown. Not the blank stares of the eligible she-wolves his advisors paraded past him.
Silver. Pale as winter moonlight. Wide with a fear she never showed during daylight hours.
The omega's eyes.
Kael slammed his fist against the dresser.
---
The pack doctor's office smelled of herbs and lies.
"I need suppressants," Kael said. No preamble. No explanation.
The doctor—an elderly wolf named Marik who'd served three Alphas—looked up from his mortar and pestle. His hands didn't shake. His voice didn't waver. But something in his ancient eyes went very still.
"What kind, Alpha?"
"You know what kind."
Marik set down the pestle. He walked to the window, checked that it was closed, then turned back. "The last wolf who asked me for mate-bond suppressants was your grandfather. Do you know what happened to him?"
"I don't care."
"He went mad within a year. Paced his chambers until his claws wore grooves in the stone. Howled at the moon for a woman who wasn't his mate—who couldn't be his mate, because he'd burned the bond out of his own blood." Marik's voice dropped. "He died with foam on his lips and her name frozen on his tongue."
Kael's expression didn't change. "Give me the suppressants."
"Alpha—"
"That's an order."
Marik held his gaze for a long moment. Then he turned to the locked cabinet, withdrew a small glass vial of amber liquid, and set it on the counter between them.
"One drop under the tongue each morning," he said quietly. "It will hold the bond at bay. But it won't kill it. Nothing kills a fated bond, Alpha. It will only grow hungrier."
Kael took the vial. "Good."
He was gone before Marik could say another word.
---
Three days later, the rogues came.
Elara was mending linens in the eastern storehouse when Marcus's voice cut through the afternoon haze like a blade.
"Ambush. North tree line. Twelve of them. They'll hit the hunting party in ninety seconds."
Elara's needle paused. "What hunting party?"
"Alpha Kael's."
Her heart stopped. She didn't know why. She didn't want to know why. But her body was already moving, already running, already shouting warnings at guards who barely glanced at her before she rounded the corner and saw—
Teeth. Blood. Kael with his back against an oak, three rogues closing in, his guards already down or dying.
He was good. She could see that even from here. Precise. Brutal. But three against one were impossible odds, and the largest rogue was circling left, looking for the opening in Kael's guard—
"Low sweep," Marcus barked in her ear. "Then throat strike. Then pivot—"
Elara didn't think. She moved.
Her body became a thing she borrowed, the spirits' knowledge flowing through her limbs like water through cracked stone. She swept the first rogue's legs.
Drove her palm into the second's throat. Used the third's momentum to throw him into the oak, where Kael finished him with a single, efficient twist.
Then it was over.
Kael stood in the blood-soaked leaves, chest heaving, and stared at her.
"You," he said.
Elara stepped back. The spirits' whispers faded. Her hands began to shake. "I just—Marcus told me—I mean, I heard—"
"How did you fight like that?"
"I didn't. I can't. I—"
He grabbed her wrist.
The world went white.
---
The bond snapped into place like a jaw closing around her spine.
Elara felt everything. His exhaustion. His hunger—not for food, for her. The suppressants burning through his veins, fighting a war they were losing. And underneath it all, a terror so vast and so ancient that it stole her breath.
He was afraid of her.
No. He was afraid of what she meant.
Kael's grip tightened. His silver eyes—her silver eyes, she realized with a jolt—bore into hers. His lips parted.
"No," he whispered.
Elara looked at the blood on his hands. At the suppressant vial peeking from his pocket.
At the future she could see written in the bond like a scar: Serena's poison, the pack's rejection, the slow unraveling of everything she'd built to protect herself.
She whispered back, "I know."
Behind them, hidden in the treeline, Serena lowered the knife she'd been about to use on Elara's back. Her smile was small and sweet and utterly without mercy.
She'd have to be more subtle than poison.
But she had time.
She had all the time in the world.
- Writer
