Kelly
I woke up to an empty bed.
The spot beside me was still warm and smelled faintly of Alaric but he was nowhere in sight. For a brief second, panic stirred in my chest before logic caught up. He must have had something important to do. He was the Alpha King after all; duty probably called him before dawn.
Still, the silence in the room felt too heavy, too still. The absence of his presence pressed against me like cold air. I sat up slowly, brushing my tangled hair away from my face and rubbing the sleep from my eyes. My throat still ached faintly from last night, from the strangling, and the memory made my fingers twitch toward it before I forced them away.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood. My body felt heavy, bruised in ways that weren’t visible. Shuffling toward the bathroo
