MATED TO THE COLD ALPHA

Chapter 16

Sera POV

I barely got any sleep.

Not really. I lay on top of the covers in Kira's guest room, my phone face down on the pillow beside me. I stared at the ceiling until the thin, pale light pressed through the curtains.

Kira invited me to sleep with her in the guest room. I agreed without hesitation. Anything is better than having to stay alone in that locked chamber room where I have no freedom of my own.

My eyes felt like sandpaper.

My chest felt worse.

William Collins. I had said his full name out of the blue, loud in that entrance hall like a declaration, and I didn't know if it had landed in his ear or dissolved and disappeared into the expensive air of this house like how he always ignores my pleas.

I pressed the heel of my palm against my sternum and breathed.

The sun had already fully risen in the estate. I grabbed my phone from the bed, turned it on, and saw it was 2 pm, meaning I overslept. I dropped my phone back on the bed and started stretching my arms wide, yawning myself awake.

Everyone had started waking up in the pack. I could hear the sound of everyone moving within the pack house, that particular shift in the air when a building woke up from its slumber and was now active, footsteps moving somewhere below, doors opening and closing, the distant sound of voices carrying through walls that were too thick to let words through.

Then something changed.

Then I heard the footsteps were moving, faster, louder, more of them, with a purpose that felt different from the estate's normal morning rhythm that I couldn't articulate but felt in the tightening of my stomach.

I sat up.

Outside the window, below in the yard, figures were moving across the grounds, not training, not patrolling. But converging. Two from the eastern path, three from the direction of what I thought was the residential wing, more coming through a side door I'd noted from my room upstairs.

All moving toward the training ground.

I was at the window before I'd made a conscious decision to stand.

The training ground below was filling. Pack members I'd never seen before, men and women, wolves of varying rank based on how they carried themselves, some in training clothes, some clearly pulled from other duties, some whose faces carried the careful blankness of people who had been summoned and didn't yet know why.

At the centre of it all, standing absolutely still with his hands tugged in his pockets and his back straight, absolutely tall, was Alpha Zerk.

Even from two floors up, the shape of him was immediately distinct. The particular way he occupied space. The radius of emptiness around him that nobody stepped into without being invited.

He was waiting for everyone to arrive.

The door slammed open from behind me. I turned around and saw who it was.

“Kira,” I called out.

“They woke and called me up too. Something's happening outside in the training ground. Let's go and check it out. I'll go on ahead and wait for you in the corridor once you're done dressing up.”

I opened my mouth. But she was already gone.

I stood up and started getting dressed. Wearing the clothes she lent to me last night. I first refused, but she insisted that I have them.

---

Kira was already waiting in the corridor outside, now wearing a t-shirt and tight-fitting jeans, but standing with the kind of alert energy of someone who had slept lightly and woken fast. She grabbed my arm the second she saw me, not roughly, just with urgency, and steered me toward the staircase without preamble.

"What is it, what's happening?" I asked quietly.

"No idea." Her voice was low. "But everyone has been summoned outside by my grizzly cousin. Every single person in this pack." A pause. "Including the maids."

My stomach dropped.

The entrance hall was empty when we reached it. Through the front windows, the training ground was visible, fuller now, the assembled pack arranged in something resembling order, loose groupings by rank that I recognised from the way they stood relative to each other.

Cael appeared in the doorway. He looked at me. Then at Kira. His jaw was tight.

"You shouldn't be out here," He said. To me specifically.

"She's with me," Kira said before I could speak. Pleasantly. With iron underneath it.

Something moved in Cael's expression, a brief calculation, and then he stepped aside without further argument, which told me more about how Kira was regarded in this pack than anything that had been said about her so far.

We stopped just outside the front doorway.

From afar, the Alpha hadn't moved from the centre of the training ground. The assembled pack was quiet in the specific way a crowd was when the person at the front of it hadn't spoken yet, but everyone present already understood the gravity of the moment.

He turned around.

Even from here, even at this distance, the look on his face made the air feel heavier.

"One of you," he said, and his voice carried across the entire ground without effort, without being raised, without anything resembling the performance of authority. "has been feeding information about this pack to an outside source. One of you photographed the intruder that I captured days ago and delivered a photograph to our enemies."

The silence that followed was the densest I had ever heard. But it was nothing compared to the knot that tightened in my stomach when he mentioned me in front of everyone.

Nobody moved. Low murmurs rippled through the crowd like a current before going silent, just low murmurs going around from everyone.

"I don't make accusations." His eyes moved slowly across the assembled faces. "I first make confirmations. So whoever it is, and I know the person is here, should understand that I'm giving them exactly an opportunity to step forward before I find out who it is myself. And once I find that person, they will not live to see the next light of day."

The training ground stayed still.

Five seconds. Ten.

I was watching everyone in the crowd, methodically, face by face, reading the specific quality of each person's stillness. Some were afraid in a general way, the ambient fear of people in proximity to something dangerous. Some were angry. Some were confused.

And one–.

One face, near the back left, was doing something different entirely.

Not afraid. Not confused. But his body shaking.

Barely, so subtly that I almost missed it, but I didn't. The slight direction of the guy's eyes. The way his body weight had shifted toward the outer edge of the crowd. It was the look of someone containing pressure within themselves.

My hand closed around Kira's arm without meaning to.

She looked at me. Saw something in my face. "What's wrong, Sera?"

“He... He just said that someone took a photograph of me in this pack. What does he mean by that?” I stated. Panic rising in my chest.

“You're right, I wonder what he means by that?” Kira answered.

But before I could say anything else, something cut through the heavy air of the training ground entirely.

The sound of an engine.

The kind of sound that belonged to something that didn't need to announce itself because everything about it already did.

Every head in the training ground turned not toward the Alpha, not toward each other, but toward the main gates as they groaned open. A sleek black Range Rover rolled through, moving unhurriedly across the gravel like it owned every inch of the ground it touched. It pulled into the open space beside the wall and stopped.

The engine died.

Nobody spoke.

The driver's door opened, and a man stepped out.

Tall. Broad. Built like something that had been designed specifically to take up space and fill it. Dark coat. Unhurried movements. The kind of stillness that wasn't passivity, it was control wearing a calm face.

The reaction that moved through the assembled pack was immediate and unlike anything I'd seen from them before. Not fear. Not the tense submission they showed the Alpha. Something different, a collective shift, like a room full of people straightening without being told to, everyone who had been focused entirely on the Alpha suddenly redirecting their attention with a weight that told me this man mattered to every single one of them.

Everyone buzzed through the crowd like a current.

I felt Kira's arm tense under my hand.

The man's eyes swept the training ground once, calm, precise, missing nothing and then landed on the Alpha standing at the centre of it all.

Something passed between them across the distance. Wordless. Weighted.

I looked around at the faces nearest to me. Recognition. Relief on some. A particular kind of alertness to others that hadn't been there seconds ago.