The Shadow Eater's Forbidden Mate

Chapter 3: Claimed to Spite a Rival

Vera

The mud at the southern border had gone the color of old rust under the moon, churned up by boots and hooves and whatever else had already crossed it. I stood behind a wall of Alaric’s warriors, wrapped too tight in his oversized tunic, watching Callum’s men line up across the boundary line like they thought a show of force would make this easier for everyone.

It wouldn’t. I could already feel that in the way the trees themselves seemed to lean away from us.

Callum stood at the front of his line, power flared to its limit, the kind of posturing that used to make my knees weak when I still thought it meant something. Celine hung off his shoulder, looking at the dark forest like she’d already priced it.

The trees parted, and Alaric walked out ahead of his men in a heavy dark coat that made his shoulders look carved from something. His eyes hadn’t cooled since the fortress. If anything, they’d gotten worse — that low gold burn of a man deciding exactly how much damage he was willing to do tonight.

“You’re trespassing, Crest.” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. I watched three of Callum’s warriors take an involuntary step back.

Callum forced himself forward anyway, chin up, doing his best impression of a man who wasn’t rattled. “I’m here for what belongs to my pack. Hand her over, and my men walk away without spilling blood. Don’t start a war over one useless girl.”

“A fugitive,” Alaric said, crossing his arms, unbothered. “My trackers found her dying in the mud on my land, reeking of a rejection you’re clearly proud of. By the old laws, a packless wolf belongs to no one. You have no claim here.”

“She’s Silvercrest property,” Celine spat, glaring at me like I’d stolen something from her by existing. “An unclaimed Omega doesn’t get to just wander wherever she likes.”

Callum’s eyes finally found me, standing half-hidden in another man’s clothes, and something ugly moved across his face. Maybe it was the scent clinging to me, or just the fact that I wasn’t groveling. Whatever he saw, it lit something possessive and furious in him at once.

“Vera,” he growled, deploying the command voice he used to use on the training grounds. “Get over here. Now.”

My knees actually buckled, some old muscle memory of obedience trying to drag me forward before I could stop it. I hated my own body for it. But before I’d taken a full step, Alaric moved, fast enough that I barely registered it as motion, and put his entire frame between us.

“You’ll have to be deaf, boy,” he said, soft and terrible, “because I already told you. She stays. Cross that line and my men will take your army apart piece by piece.”

“Are you insane?” Callum’s face went a mottled, furious red. “Risking a border war over pack trash?”

Alaric turned his head, looking down at me with an expression I couldn’t read yet, assessing maybe, or something closer to deciding. Then, deliberately, he reached out and pulled me flush against his side, one arm locking around my waist. That same electric current sparked where his hand met my skin, and I felt it settle into something steadier this time, less shock and more current.

He faced Callum again, and his power rolled out from him like a wave breaking against the shoreline. I felt the air pressure change, felt Callum’s men flinch under it as if struck.

“She’s not nobody,” Alaric said, loud enough to carry across the whole border. “And she’s no longer yours to reject twice. She is under my protection.”

Callum stared, some of the fury draining into something closer to fear. Beside him, Celine’s confidence cracked visibly.

“Cross into my territory again,” Alaric said, quieter now, leaning close enough that only I could hear the second half, “and I’ll finish what you started tonight — permanently.”

Humiliated, Callum barked an order and his men began retreating across the river, boots slipping in the churned mud.

I looked up at Alaric once the tension broke, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. “You told them I was under your protection. Did you mean it, or was that only to embarrass him?”

The fire in his eyes banked, and he stepped back, releasing my waist so abruptly the night air rushed in cold where his hand had been. “It was politics, Vera. Nothing more. Tomorrow my men will find you somewhere safer to —”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

A sound tore out of his throat that didn’t belong to a man — raw, animal, agonized. He dropped hard to one knee in the mud, both hands clawing at his own chest, and I watched black veins spread up his throat and across his jaw like ink bleeding through water.

His golden eyes rolled back, and when they opened again, the gold was gone. Drowned in black, all the way through.