Entangled With My New Alpha Mate

Chapter 3 The Night

Amber POV

Three days passed before the healer finally said my shoulder had mended enough to travel, and in those three days I saw Kaelan more than I expected to for a man who claimed I was only his problem.

He came to check on me every evening, always with some excuse, a report he needed to deliver personally, a question about the Brighton territory he claimed was for security reasons, though I noticed he never once wrote down my answers. We argued more than we talked. I told him his arrogance would get him killed one day, and he told me my pride would get me killed first, and somewhere between the insults we both started finding reasons to linger a little longer than either conversation required.

On the third night, he found me in the garden behind the healer's quarters instead of my room, sitting on a low stone wall with my knees pulled up and my eyes on the moon. I had not been able to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Damian's hand in Ivy's hair, and I had come outside hoping the cold air would quiet my mind enough to let me rest.

"You should be resting," Kaelan said, appearing at the edge of the garden the way he always seemed to appear, without warning, as though the land itself told him where to find me.

"You should stop checking on your problems personally," I said. "Do you not have an Alpha's duties to attend to?"

"I attended to them hours ago." He walked closer and leaned against the wall a few feet from me, close enough that I felt the warmth of him even through the night air. "You are not sleeping."

"Observant."

"You are also not going to tell me why," he said, "even though I can smell grief on you like it never left."

I turned to look at him then, startled that he would say it so plainly, and something in his gray eyes told me he was not mocking me. He was simply stating what he saw, the way he seemed to state everything, without softness but without cruelty either.

"My mate rejected me," I said, before I could stop myself. "Four nights ago. He chose my own sister instead and told her she would be his Luna while I stood there and watched."

Kaelan went very still beside me, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, and I almost regretted telling him, certain he would look at me with the same pity Ivy had worn that night. Instead, when he spoke, his voice had lost its usual sharpness.

"Then he is a fool," he said, "and he does not deserve the word mate if he could look at you and choose someone else."

I did not know what to say to that. No one had said anything like it to me since the rejection, and I felt something crack open in my chest that I had spent three days trying to keep sealed shut. I looked away from him, blinking hard, refusing to let him see me cry after I had already refused Damian and Ivy that same satisfaction.

"You do not have to be kind to me," I said. "I know what I am to you. A problem that wandered onto your land."

"I never said you were only that." His voice was quiet now, closer than it had been a moment ago, and when I glanced back at him I found he had moved, close enough that I could see the flecks of silver in his eyes catching the moonlight. "I have called you many things since you arrived, Amber, but I have not once believed you were only a problem."

My heart was pounding in a way that had nothing to do with grief anymore. "Then what am I?"

"I don't know yet," he admitted, and there was something truthful in his words, something that told me arrogance was not the only thing living underneath that title he wore so easily. "But I know I have not stopped thinking about you since the moment I told my men to stand down."

I should have stepped back. I should have reminded him, and myself, that I had walked away from one Alpha's bed only days ago with my heart in pieces, and that the last thing I needed was another man's hands on me before I had even learned how to breathe without the ache of rejection following every breath. But when he lifted a hand and brushed his knuckles against my cheek, gentle in a way I had not expected from him, I did not pull away.

"Kaelan," I said, half warning, half something else I did not want to name.

"Tell me to stop," he said, "and I will."

I did not tell him to stop.

His mouth found mine slowly, nothing like the desperate collision I might have imagined from a man who carried himself like he owned every room he walked into. He kissed me like he was asking a question, patient, waiting to see if I would answer, and when I did, when my hands found the front of his shirt and pulled him closer instead of pushing him away, something between us shifted in a way I felt down to my bones.

There was no bond pulling us together the way fate had pulled me toward Damian all those years ago. There was only this, his hand cradling my face, my fingers curling into the fabric over his chest, two people who had both been hollowed out by something and had found, for one night, a reason to feel whole again.

He asked me again, quieter, his forehead resting against mine, if I was certain, and I told him I was, more certain of that single moment than I had been of anything in the four days since my whole world had come apart.

What followed was not about fate or bonds or the future waiting for either of us beyond the walls of that garden and the room he led me to afterward. It was warmth after cold, tenderness after cruelty, a night where for the first time since Damian's rejection I did not feel like something broken and discarded, but like a woman who could still be wanted, still be touched gently, still matter to someone even if only for a handful of stolen hours.

I fell asleep with my head against his chest and his arm wrapped around me, and for the first time in four days, I did not dream of Damian at all.

When I woke, the sun was already climbing over the trees outside the window, and Kaelan was gone from the bed beside me.