MATED TO THE COLD ALPHA

Chapter 9

Sera POV

Day two had arrived. I had counted every meal, every guard change, every thin grey strip of light that crept through the latched window. Casting light across the floor until darkness swallowed it whole again.

I was standing at the window before the sun had fully cleared the treeline.

The yard below was already alive.

Eight wolves were running combat drills in the cleared space. Not in shifted forms, just hand-to-hand combat. Moving with a speed and precision that made my chest tighten. Every strike landed with intention. Every block was already a counter before the hit finished landing. The sound of impact carried up through the glass in dull rhythmic thuds that I felt more than heard.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold window and watched.

Back at Ashbone, our warriors trained three times a week. Mandatory. Supervised. Half of them spent more energy complaining about it than doing it. The eight wolves below hadn't stopped training for an hour now, and somehow they still had this much energy.

The cold reality settled into my stomach, full of stones.

I would not make it past the front gate.

I’d replayed the escape so often in my mind that my brain felt bruised. Even if I got out of this room, past the locked door, past the guards, down the corridor, down the stairs, then what? I would still be inside an estate full of wolves who could hear a heartbeat change from three rooms away. Who could track a scent across the entire territory without breaking stride.

And I had nothing to run with.

No phone, no bag, not even the roots that are the most important of them all.

I pressed my forehead against the glass and let the cold seep through my skin.

William.

Months on that bed. Months of Grethe's worn remedies running thinner every week. It had been four days since I left my pack. Four days of no contact, no update, no way of knowing whether he was still fighting for his life or whether the curse had finally–.

I pushed off the window. Striding across the entire room. My mind is running restless with how I can escape with the roots from this pack.

I crossed back to the window. Then I heard a honk.

Below in the yard, a black SUV rolled through the main gates and stopped near the far end of the clearing. Two men climbed out of the car carrying supply crates. A third stayed behind the wheel, engine running. One of the training wolves broke away from the drill without being called out, already knowing he was needed and crossed the yard to meet them. He signed something with a pen and was handed the goods. A brief exchange. The SUV reversed back through the gate and eased down the road beyond.

I tracked the man with the crates as he walked toward the side of the building.

There.

Somewhere on the ground level. Observing to the left of my window at an angle I hadn't been able to see clearly until now. It opened from the inside as the man approached it, someone on the other side letting him in, and for two seconds before it swung shut. I saw the edge of a corridor.

A service entrance.

I filed it away alongside the guard rotation times and the corridor map I had been building in my head ever since they moved me to this room. None of it added up to an escape yet. But I keep adding them piece by piece. And I had nothing else to do with my time except form an escape plan.

Then the yard shifted. The heavy air shifted. The training wolves pulled back a fraction without being told to. The man who had handled the crates straightened mid-stride.

And then he walked out of the estate's main door into the yard.

The Alpha.

Even from two floors up, the difference was immediate. He moved through the space below like the yard had welcomed him whole. Dark jacket, dark pants, his lazy, fluid strides devoured the distance, moving with the terrifying pace of a hunting wolf. He stopped near the centre and said something to the nearest man. The man responded with a short nod and moved before the Alpha had finished speaking.

I watched him cross to the training group, stood at the edge of it and said something that made the two wolves in the middle reset their positions and move in different directions.

Then he pulled his phone from his pocket. Read something, and typed a response without breaking stride as he moved back toward the centre of the yard.

A searing heat flared beneath my ribcage, burning through my blood as the bond snapped awake.

It pulled.

Slow and quiet, and completely indifferent to every argument I had against it. A warmth that sneered through me and spread outward with no source I could point out and no off switch I could find. I pressed my fingers harder against the cold glass, trying to use its temperature as a countermeasure.

It didn't work.

He was dangerous. He had my brother's only chance of survival sitting somewhere in this building. He had taken my phone and locked me in a room. He had felt the bond and stepped back from it in the space before he had gone straight back to his cold demeanour.

The warmth in my chest didn't care about any of that. I keep telling it to stop, even though it refuses to.

Below in the yard, the Alpha stopped walking.

Stood completely still for a moment in the middle of the space with his phone in his hand.

Then he turned his head and looked directly up at my window.

Not scanning the building. Not checking the upper floors generally. Directly. Precisely. At exactly the window I was standing behind with my palm against the glass and my forehead still carrying the cold from where I had pressed it there minutes ago.

Those golden brown eyes found mine across two floors and through the glass and held them without blinking.

My breath fogged the window in a small cloud.

I should have stepped back. Every sensible instinct I had said to step back, to move away from the glass, to stop looking, to stop letting him see that I had been standing here watching him this whole time.

I didn't move.

Neither did he.

The yard moved around him, wolves continuing their drills, a guard crossing the far end, a door opening and closing somewhere below, and none of it touched the stillness of him standing there looking up at me with that expression I couldn't make out from up here and couldn't stop trying to.

The warmth beneath my ribs pulled tighter.

Then his phone rang.

He broke the look to answer it. Said something short. His jaw tightened once, barely visible from this distance, but I caught sight of it, and he turned and walked back inside without looking up at me again.

I stood at the window with my palm still against the glass.

My heart was doing something I absolutely refused to give a name to.

Then it came from somewhere below me, deep inside the estate, through floors and walls and the controlled quietness of a building that ran on discipline and order.

A heavy thud. Slamming hard enough to send a vibration up through the wall beneath my fingers.

Then a voice. That of a man. Not the Alpha's. Sharp and urgent and carrying something that cut straight through the building's usual silence like it had no patience left for being contained.

Then the Alpha's voice. Sounded low and immediate.

Then nothing.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

Because that kind of silence, the suffocating silence that only fell when the air held its breath.

My hand slid slowly down the cold glass.

And from somewhere directly outside my locked door came the sound of running footsteps.