The Alpha's Runaway Mate

Chapter 5 — Claim or War

Everything stopped.

I hadn't given an order and neither had he, but the battlefield went still around us like the world had decided to hold its breath. Men on both sides stood where they were. The only sounds were distant, wind in the trees, someone's engine ticking as it cooled.

Three seconds. That's all I allowed myself.

Then I ripped my hand free.

"Get out of my way," I said.

"Lyra."

"Move."

He didn't move. He looked at me instead the way he always had, like he was reading something written underneath my skin, like the surface of me was a language he'd already spent years translating. It had never not infuriated me. Five years away had not changed that.

"Five years," he said. "You're good at disappearing."

"I had good reasons."

"You had half of one." His voice was level. "You left before I could explain."

The laugh that came out of me was short and without any warmth in it. "Explain what, Ronan. Explain the woman sitting in your private room carrying your child while the pack elders sat around her like she was already queen? Explain which part of that was supposed to be something I misunderstood?"

"None of it," he said. "I'm not here to tell you it was right."

That stopped me. I'd expected arguments, justifications, the smooth machinery of his logic. Not that.

"Then what are you here for."

"You." He said it like it was a simple fact he was tired of working around. Like the five years and the blown bond and the army he'd apparently built hadn't changed the basic thing underneath all of it. "You never stopped being my mate. The bond never broke. You know that as well as I do."

"The bond is not the same as a choice," I said. "You made your choices. I saw them sitting in that chair."

Something moved through his face. Not guilt exactly. Closer to the particular pain of a person who knows they earned what happened to them and has had years to sit with that knowledge.

"The surrogate is dead." He said it plainly, no softening around it. "Complications in the early months. There was no heir. Every attempt after that failed. The bloodline I destroyed you for doesn't exist, Lyra. There's nothing." His eyes held mine. "Except for what you've been hiding."

The cold that moved through me then was a different kind from the one in that room five years ago. That had been grief and fury. This was something sharper.

"I'm not hiding anything," I said.

"Stop." His voice came out quiet and tired, not commanding. "I felt it the night he was born. The bond lit up with something I'd never felt before. I knew he existed. I've known for five years, and I waited because I knew if I came at you like this too soon you'd disappear again and I'd never find you." A pause. "I'm done waiting."

I looked past him. My crew was still standing, injured but upright. His men held their positions at the road's edges. I had maybe a minute before this moment dissolved into something messier and harder to navigate.

My mind was already moving, counting steps to the bikes, mapping the route back, calculating how long he'd had eyes on the compound and what that meant for what his people already knew.

He wasn't making an appeal. He was executing a plan.

"Stand down," he said quietly, and the men around us eased back.

And then there was a ripple. Through the bond, through that wire-thin connection that had survived five years and a thousand miles, came something that wasn't a sound. A command shaped in the wordless language Alphas used when they wanted the pack mind-link to carry something without words.

Find the child.

I heard it. I shouldn't have been able to, the mind-link wasn't mine to access. But the bond was wide open now, stripped raw by proximity, and it carried everything across without asking permission.

I was moving before he registered that I'd gone.

Two of his men were between me and the bikes. I went through them, not around, using speed and anger and five years of learning to fight without relying on strength. Ronan shouted something behind me. I didn't hear the words. The engine was already on and the road was already under me, the headlight cutting a white line through the dark trees.

Kael.

His name sat in the center of my chest like a coal while I drove, hot and constant. Five years of careful. Five years of quiet. Five years of keeping him small and unknown and protected inside a world that didn't ask questions. And Ronan had been watching the corridor. Had mapped our Tuesday routes. Had known for five years that there was a child to find and had chosen patience over speed, waiting until he had enough in place to make one move count.

How long had his people been inside our perimeter? How long before someone made the mistake of letting a face they didn't recognize get close to the compound? Close to Kael?

I pushed the throttle further.

The road unspooled in front of me, empty and dark and too long. I calculated distances. I made myself breathe. I thought about Kael's face in the morning when he woke up angry about something from a dream, and about the way he grabbed my hand when he thought I wasn't paying attention and wasn't going to make a thing of it, and about how I had promised him, in the wordless way that you promise children things, that the world would not get to him.

My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.

I grabbed it at the next straight stretch, thumb finding the screen without looking away from the road.

Jax.

I answered it.

Three seconds of silence. The kind that tells you everything before the words start.

"Lyra." His voice was stripped down to nothing but information, tight and controlled the way it only got when the situation was already past the point of careful. A single short breath. "Someone just took Kael."

The road in front of me blurred.

I held the phone. I held the road. I held the sound that wanted to come out of my throat and I turned it into something that had no name but was harder and colder than fear and sharper than grief, and I pressed it flat inside my chest where it would stay until I had something to aim it at.

I pressed down on the throttle and drove into the dark.