MATED TO THE COLD ALPHA

Chapter 15

Sera POV

Kira found me exactly where she'd left me.

Sitting on the cream sofa with my bandaged hands in my lap and the cold mug between my palms and the particular hollowness behind my eyes that came from being too exhausted to sleep and too afraid to stop thinking.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, her heels gone now, replaced with waffle slippers, a silk sleep set and looked at me from where I was sitting.

"You're still here." She said.

"Where else would I go?" The words came out flat. Not self-pitying. Just factual.

Something shifted in her expression. She came in and sat down, not across from me, right beside me, close enough that the warmth of her arm pressed against mine and looked at the cold mug still in between my hands.

"How is it? Tastes good?"

"Uh, yeah. It does."

She took it from me without asking and set it on the table. Then she turned and looked at me directly with those sharp dark eyes and said: "Okay. I've been very polite, and I've asked very few questions. I think that time is now over. Who are you exactly, and why does my cousin look like he wants to lash out at you?"

I stared at her.

"I'm being serious here." She said. "I've known him for twenty-five years. He doesn't normally act like that."

"Like what?"

"Him talking more in front of someone else. Literally you." She tilted her head. "What did you do to him?"

"I trespassed on his territory," I said carefully.

"People trespass on Ironveil pack all the time." She said. "He deals with them and moves on. But he does not bring them inside and treats them like—" she stopped herself, her lips pressed in a thin line like she was editing something out. "Never mind. The point is, you're clearly not just an intruder. So what's the real story?"

I looked at my bandaged hands.

She waited.

"My younger brother is sick, cursed even." The words came out before I'd decided to say them. "He has an ancient werewolf curse on him. And I found out that the only thing that can help break it and save him grows in this pack, the Moonveil roots." I lifted my eyes slowly to meet hers. "So I came here alone and found what I needed. But then I got caught." A pause. "And now I've been locked in a room for almost a week, the roots taken from me and my brother is still fighting for his life back at my pack."

The sitting room was very quiet.

Kira had gone very still beside me. The easy social warmth had shifted into something heavier, more focused, the way a camera shifts from wide angle to close-up.

"You mean he is keeping you here against your will despite knowing the situation of your brother?" She said it slowly, like she was laying each word down carefully to make sure I heard her correctly.

"Yes."

"Zerk is such a–" She stopped. Started again. "My cousin is forcefully detaining you in his house."

"In a locked room," I said. "With guards always changing shifts outside the door."

Something crossed her face that I couldn't fully read. She stood up abruptly and walked to the window, arms crossed over her chest, looking out at the dark grounds below with her jaw set in a way that reminded me sharply of the Alpha, Zerk, now, since I got to hear his name.

"Fuck." She said quietly. More to herself than to me.

"Kira–"

"No, it's nothing, I just–" She turned around. "I just need a moment."

I watched her. Lost in her own thoughts behind her eyes. After a moment, she came back to the sofa and sat down. Looked at me with an expression that had gone from socially warm to something considerably more serious.

"Okay." She said, "I'm taking you out of here."

I blinked. "What?"

"You need to get back to your brother, right? I have a car outside. The gate guards know my vehicle and will let me pass. Also, if you need the Moonveil roots, we'll just get a new batch from the woods.” She was already standing back up, moving toward the door with the decisive energy of someone who had made their final decision and was already pacing three steps ahead. "Grab your things, we're leaving."

"Kira–"

"I'm not asking him or waking him up. I'm just–" she paused, she stopped in the doorway and looked back at me over her shoulder with something fierce and completely unguarded in her eyes. "Nobody should be kept from their cursed sibling. That's not right. That's not–" She cut herself off. "Get your things now!"

Something hot and desperate surged up through my chest.

I got my jacket and made sure my phone was in my pocket.

---

The corridor was quiet. The estate had settled deep into the night, the kind of silence that only existed after midnight when even the most vigilant packs let their guard drop by a fraction. Kira and I moved through the pack house, her heels traded for slippers that made no sound on the dark floors, and I followed her with my heart hammering so hard I was certain the walls could hear it.

Down the main staircase. Through the entrance hall. Past the map room that still spilt amber light into the corridor from its half-open door.

The front door was twenty feet away.

Fifteen.

Ten.

Kira's hand closed around the handle.

Then a voice came from behind us.

"Going somewhere?"

We both froze.

I knew that voice. I knew exactly the temperature of it, the controlled quiet of it, the way it filled a space without needing to be raised. My spine straightened itself before I'd made any conscious decision to move.

I turned around slowly.

The Alpha stood at the base of the staircase. Still dressed. Like he hadn't slept yet and hadn't intended to. His arms were loose at his sides, and his eyes were gold-brown and flat and moving between Kira and me with an expression that was somehow colder than anger.

Kira talked first.

"I was just about to take her out for a drive." She said, with the extraordinary confidence of someone who talked like we weren't trying to escape. "She needed air."

"At two in the morning."

"One of the best times for it, you know."

He looked at her for exactly three seconds. Then his eyes moved to me. And whatever was in that look, that flat, absolute, completely unreadable look, made the warmth that had been building in my chest curl under and go quiet.

"Go back to your room." He said. To me.

"Zerk–" Kira started.

"Kira." His voice was above a whisper. "This doesn't involve you."

"But her brother is–"

"I know." Two words. Final and absolute. "Go back to your room." Still looking at me. Still with that expression I couldn't name. "Both of you."

“You want to just do this to her”, Kira started.

“I have the final say. Even you know better than to disobey my orders in this pack, even if you are my cousin.” Zerk stated.

Kira turned to me. Her eyes looked apologetic and frustrated and still fierce underneath all of those things. She reached out and squeezed my hand once, quick and firm, and then dropped it.

I stood in the entrance hall with the front door two feet behind me and looked at the Alpha standing at the base of the stairs, and felt the distance between where I was and where he was, like a physical weight pressing down through my chest into the floor.

"Please." The word scraped out of me raw and quiet. Tears streaming down my eyes. "He is all I have."

Something moved through those golden brown eyes.

Fast. Gone before I could name it. Buried under layers of control so thick and so practised that I might have imagined it entirely.

He said nothing.

He just stepped aside.

Not toward the door. Toward the staircase, waiting. Eyes on me. Patient and immovable in the way that mountains were. Not because they chose to be, but because they simply were, and nothing about the weather could even change that.

Kira touched my arm once more.

I turned and walked toward the stairs.

Behind me, I heard the front door click shut with a sound so final it pressed against the back of my throat like something I needed to swallow.

I stopped on the third step.

"His name is William Collins," I stated. To everyone who could hear me. "He's sixteen years old. He's an energetic and playful guy. He throws training spears further than wolves twice his age. He's barely been able to lift his own hands for over a year." I pressed my palm flat against the wall beside me and felt the cold of the plaster against my skin. "That's whom I'm trying to save. I thought you should know his name at least."

The entrance hall was silent behind me.

I kept walking.

And from somewhere below me, quiet enough that I almost didn't catch it, I heard Kira's voice, low and pointed and entirely without her usual warmth.

"She just told you his name, Zerk. Do something about that.”