The Alpha's Sun-Blessed Mate

Chapter 3

The pack meeting hall was standing room only by seven forty-five.

I sat in the front row between my parents, wearing a simple blue dress I’d picked because it was clean and didn’t make me look like I’d been crying for four hours. I’d washed my face, put on fresh mascara, bitten some color into my lips. Dragged a brush through my hair until the caramel waves fell smooth past my shoulders. I looked put together.

I was anything but.

The whole pack knew. Of course they did. Werewolf communities are just small towns with fangs. Albert and Mira. The cheating. The broken arrangement. Alpha Luca flying home in a fury. Everyone had heard and everyone had an opinion and every single one of those opinions was aimed at the back of my skull like a spotlight.

Poor Annabelle. Can you believe it? Six months. With her best friend. And she had no idea.

I kept my hands folded in my lap and my spine straight. I would not give them a show.

Albert sat on the opposite side of the hall with Mira beside him. They weren’t touching but they didn’t need to be. The way their bodies angled toward each other said everything. Mira looked like she might throw up. Albert’s jaw was set with that stubborn defiance he probably thought passed for bravery.

The clock on the wall read 7:58.

My wolf was doing something strange. She’d been pacing since the phone call. Not anxious, exactly. More like anticipation. Like she knew something I didn’t and was getting impatient with me for not catching on.

At exactly eight o’clock, the double doors at the back of the hall opened.

Every conversation died.

I felt him before I saw him. Alpha dominance rolled through the room like a pressure change before a storm. It pressed against my chest, pushed my wolf low, made the hair on my arms stand up.

Then he walked in.

Alpha Luca moved through the doorway like the room had been built around him. He was taller than I remembered. Taller than Albert by at least two inches, and broader through the chest in a way that said his muscle had been earned, not inherited. His black hair was longer now, brushing his collar, and his face was all hard angles. Sharp jaw, high cheekbones, the kind of bone structure that would look good carved into stone. He wore a dark suit that fit him like it had been sewn directly onto his body, and he moved with the lethal, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once been afraid of what was on the other side of a door.

Albert looked like him. The same dark hair, same blue eyes, same height. But standing in the shadow of his father, Albert suddenly looked like a pencil sketch next to an oil painting. The raw materials were the same. But the finished product was something else entirely.

Luca’s blue eyes swept the room. Pack members in rigid rows. Beta Marcus at attention near the stage. Albert and Mira on the left side.

And then his gaze landed on me.

The word MATE detonated in my skull.

It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t a gentle pull. It was a bomb going off in the center of my brain, shrapnel tearing through every rational thought I’d ever had. My wolf didn’t howl. She screamed. Every cell in my body caught fire, every nerve ending lighting up at once, and the mate bond slammed into place so hard my vision went white.

No. No no no no no.

Albert’s father. My fiancé’s father. The Alpha of our entire pack. A man who had to be in his mid-forties. A man whose son I was supposed to marry in three weeks. A man who looked at me with the same blue eyes his son had, except on this face they cut straight through to the back of my skull.

My wolf didn’t care about any of that. My wolf only knew one thing, and she was howling it so loud I could barely think.

MINE.

Across the room, Luca had stopped walking.

For exactly two heartbeats, he stared at me. And I saw it. The flash. His hands curled into fists at his sides, his nostrils flared, and something behind those blue eyes caught fire.

Then it was gone.

His expression locked down so fast it was like watching a vault door seal. His eyes went flat. Controlled. And he looked away from me like I was just another face in the crowd.

Something cracked in my chest.

He continued to the front of the hall, his stride measured, his face giving absolutely nothing. He stepped onto the raised platform and stood there for a long moment, letting the silence do its work. His presence filled the room the way a thunderstorm fills a sky. You couldn’t look away. You couldn’t stop waiting for the lightning.

“Albert.” His voice was deep. Cold as the stone walls around us. “Stand up.”

Albert rose slowly. His face had lost all color.

“You asked my permission to break your arranged mating.”

“Dad, I can explain...”

“I don’t want explanations.” The words came out like a blade being drawn. Quiet. Precise. “You fell in love with someone else. You’ve been conducting an affair behind your intended mate’s back for six months. You’ve humiliated her publicly. You’ve called me home from overseas to ask permission to destroy an arrangement I personally made twenty-two years ago. Is that accurate?”

Albert’s throat bobbed. “Yes, sir.”

“And you, Mira.” Luca’s gaze shifted to her and she physically shrank in her seat. “You betrayed a friendship to sleep with a man promised to another. Correct?”

“Yes, Alpha.” Her voice was barely a breath.

The hall was so quiet I could hear the clock ticking on the wall behind me.

“You wanted my permission, Albert?”

Albert swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“You have it.”

Gasps rippled through the hall. My mother’s fingers dug into my arm hard enough to bruise.

He’d approved it. Just like that. My arranged mating, twenty-two years in the making, dissolved in three words.

“However.” Luca’s voice cut the murmuring dead. His eyes found me again, and this time there was nothing flat about them. They burned. “Annabelle was promised to this bloodline. That debt still stands.”

The room went cold.

“If she’s not to be your mate, Albert, then she serves another purpose.” Luca descended the platform, each step deliberate, his eyes locked on mine like nothing else in the hall existed. “She will come with me. Tonight.”

The hall erupted.

Albert shot to his feet. “WHAT?!”

My father stood up beside me, his face darkening. My mother pulled me closer like she could shield me with her body.

“The arrangement was between our families.” Luca’s Alpha power flooded the room, so thick it forced half the hall to sit back down involuntarily. My mother gasped. My father’s knees buckled before he caught himself. “Not specifically between Albert and Annabelle. If Albert wishes to dissolve his part, fine. But Annabelle still belongs to this bloodline.”

“As what?” I heard my own voice say. It sounded steadier than I felt, which was a small miracle considering my wolf was trying to claw out of my chest.

Luca’s full attention landed on me like a physical weight. This close, maybe fifteen feet away, the mate bond was screaming so loud I thought my skull might split open. I could smell him now. Pine, something sharp, something warm underneath that made my mouth water. My wolf was clawing to get to him. Every instinct I had was pulling me toward this man like gravity.

And his face gave me nothing.

“My companion,” he said. “You’ll come to my overseas territory. Under my protection.” His gaze dropped to my mouth for half a second before returning to my eyes. “You will belong to me.”

Companion. Not mate. Not luna. Companion.

The word was deliberately vague. It could mean anything. Advisor. Assistant. Something darker that made heat curl low in my stomach despite the terror clawing up my throat. The way he said belong to me sent my pulse hammering so loud I was sure the entire front row could hear it.

Albert pushed forward. “Dad, this is insane! You can’t just take her!”

Luca looked at his son. They stood facing each other, mirror images separated by twenty years and a chasm of disappointment that made the air between them vibrate. Albert was tall but his father was taller. Albert was strong but his father was something beyond strong. Something that made strong look like a starting point.

“You made your choice.” Luca’s voice was quiet. Final. “I’m making mine. She was promised to us. If you don’t want her...” His eyes slid back to me and something flickered in them. Something possessive. Something barely caged. “I do.”

My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough that I pressed my hand flat to my chest without thinking.

He turned back to the hall. “You have two hours to pack, Annabelle.”

Then he walked toward the exit. The crowd parted for him like water around stone. No one spoke. No one moved. No one breathed.

At the door, he paused. Didn’t turn around. Just stopped, his broad back filling the frame, and spoke over his shoulder.

“Don’t make me come get you.”

And then he was gone.

The hall exploded into noise but I couldn’t hear any of it. My wolf was still screaming. My skin was on fire. My heart was beating so fast that black spots were dancing at the edges of my vision.

He’d felt it. I’d seen it in that two-second crack in his mask. He’d felt the bond.

But he’d looked away. Locked it down. Called me his companion and told me I had two hours.

He wasn’t claiming me as his mate.

He was collecting me like property.

And the worst part? The absolute worst part?

I wanted to go with him.