Entangled With My New Alpha Mate

Chapter 4 The Alpha's Guard

Kaelan POV

I left her sleeping because I did not trust myself to stay.

I stood in the hallway outside my own bedroom for a long moment after I closed the door, my hand still resting against the wood, and I told myself the tightness in my chest was nothing more than the leftover pull of a good night, the kind of ache that faded once a man returned to his duties. I had felt that ache before with other women, and it had always faded by midday.

But this did not fade.

I made my way down to the training yard instead of my study, because I needed my hands busy and my mind occupied with something other than the memory of her fingers curling into my shirt, and I found my beta, Roran, already waiting for me with a report in hand and a look on his face that told me the morning was not going to stay simple.

"You look like a man who did not sleep," Roran said, falling into step beside me.

"I slept fine."

"Then you look like a man who slept somewhere he should not have." His mouth twitched, and I gave him a look sharp enough that he raised both hands and let the subject drop, though I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was filing it away to bring up again later, when I had less patience for it.

We walked the perimeter together while he ran through the reports from the night watch, nothing unusual, no further trespassers, the borders holding steady since the incident four nights ago. I listened with half my attention, the other half still caught somewhere back in that room with the woman I had left sleeping in my bed.

I had not planned for her. I had planned for nothing about her, not the moment I called my men off in the forest, not the three days I spent inventing reasons to check on her recovery, and certainly not last night, when I had told myself I was only checking that she was resting and instead found myself unable to walk away from her in that garden.

There was no bond between us. I would have felt it the moment I first saw her if there had been, the way every Alpha in my bloodline had described it, a pull as undeniable as gravity. I felt no such pull with Amber. What I felt was something quieter and somehow more unsettling, a wanting that had nothing to do with fate and everything to do with the way she looked at me like I was a man and not a title, the way she argued with me without an ounce of the deference everyone else in my pack gave me without thinking.

I did not know what to do with a want that fate had not handed me.

"There is something else," Roran said, and something in his voice pulled me fully back into the conversation. "A visitor arrived at the border an hour ago. She is asking to see you directly."

"Who."

Roran hesitated in a way that told me he already knew I would not like the answer. "Selene."

The name landed harder than I wanted it to. I had not heard it spoken aloud in nearly two years, not since the night Selene had left my territory with barely a word of explanation, choosing an alliance with a neighboring pack over whatever we had been building between us.

I had told myself I was over the sting of it long ago, that time had worn the memory down to something distant and unimportant, but hearing her name now felt like pressing a bruise I had forgotten was still tender.

"She says she heard something happened here," Roran continued, choosing his words with the carefulness of a man who did not want to be the one to explain what that something might be. "About a woman found in the forest. She wants to see for herself."

I stopped walking. "Word travels fast."

"Word always travels fast when it involves you," Roran said, not unkindly. "You are not exactly a man people stop paying attention to, Kaelan, even the ones who left."

I did not answer that, because there was nothing useful to say to it. Selene had made her choice two years ago, and I had rebuilt my territory and my life without her in it, and I did not owe her explanations for anything that happened within my borders now, least of all for a woman I had not even fully explained to myself yet.

And yet my stomach tightened at the thought of Selene walking these grounds again, at the thought of her eyes finding Amber somewhere in the halls and drawing whatever conclusions she pleased from it.

"Where is she now," I asked.

"Waiting at the east gate. I told the guards to hold her there until you decided how you wanted to handle it." Roran studied my face for a moment longer than necessary. "You do not have to see her if you do not want to."

"I know that."

"But you are going to see her anyway."

He was not wrong, and we both knew it, because whatever Selene wanted, whatever excuse she had constructed to justify showing up at my border after two years of silence, I was not the kind of Alpha who hid from a conversation simply because it might be uncomfortable. I had built this territory on the principle that I faced problems directly, and I was not going to abandon that principle now simply because the problem in question happened to wear a face I had once loved.

I thought of Amber still asleep upstairs, her hair spread across my pillow, the quiet way she had said my name in the dark, and something in my chest twisted uncomfortably at the timing of it all, Selene appearing the very morning after the first night in two years that had made me feel like more than a title.

"Have the kitchens prepare something," I told Roran. "If she came all this way to see for herself, I am not going to make her stand at a gate to do it."

Roran nodded and turned to relay the order, and I stood alone in the training yard for a moment longer, gathering whatever composure I would need to walk toward whatever Selene had come to say, my mind still half caught on the woman sleeping upstairs and half already bracing for the one waiting at my gate.

By the time I reached the east gate, Selene was standing exactly where Roran had left her, arms crossed, dark eyes fixed on the manor behind me as though she were already searching its windows for someone she had heard was inside.

"Hello Kaelan," she said, and her voice had not changed at all in two years. "I heard you found someone in the forest."

I said nothing, and she smiled the way she always used to when she already knew she had my attention, and stepped forward through the gate before I had even decided whether to let her in.