The Hunters Alpha's Mate

Chapter 1 (LYRA'S POV) I did not want to be climbing the walls of Ashborn Pack at midnight, but here I was, barefoot on cold stone with my boots tied together and hanging off my shoulder so they wouldn't scrape against anything. A dog barked once near the east tower and then stopped, and I stayed still until I was sure nobody had heard it but me. My uncle's voice kept playing in my head, the same way it did before every job. In and out before the second bell rings. No mistakes, no witnesses, and whatever you do, don't hesitate. He's not a man anymore, he told me, over and over again, until I could probably recite it in my sleep. He's a monster who happens to wear a crown, and tonight, you're finishing what your mother should have finished a long time ago. I had heard that so many times I couldn't tell anymore which parts of it I actually believed. The window I needed to pass through was unlocked, right where my informant said it would be. I climbed through without making a sound and landed in a hallway lit by one weak lamp. The King's private room was three doors down, and there were supposed to be two guards outside it, half asleep by this hour according to everything I'd studied for the last two weeks. There weren't any guards at all. I stopped where they should have been standing and listened. No struggle, no sound, nothing. Just a hallway that was too quiet, and a door flung open like it was waiting for me. My pulse picked up in a way I didn't like. A clean job doesn't feel like this, a clean job shouldn’t make the hair on your arms stand up. My gut said, 'Turn around,' but my uncle had warned me they might be expecting someone from our side, and everything about this felt like a trap. But I also knew what happened when I came home without finishing a job, and Commander Voss didn't care that I was his niece when it came to excuses. So I pulled the silver blade out of my boot, told myself I could handle whatever was waiting on the other side of that door, and pushed it open with two fingers. He was lying on his back, one arm thrown over his face, and the sheet was twisted around his waist. He looked younger than I expected, and nothing in my clan's files had prepared me for that. On paper, he was a name attached to a body count. Lying there asleep, he looked like a man who hadn't slept properly in weeks, and for one stupid second, I almost felt bad about what I was there to do. Almost. I'd taken down men younger than him before. I crossed the room slowly, blade down at my side, watching every rise and fall of his chest, waiting for the moment he'd stir. Then, I finally climbed onto the edge of the bed, my whole body was tight as a wire, every sense telling me this was too easy, too quiet, too perfect. My heart was pounding way harder than it should have been for a job this simple. I put the blade against his throat. His eyes opened immediately. And I was met with the greenest eyes ever, the one that made my heart skip immediately it flung open. There was no confusion in his face, none of that half second where a normal person wakes up and tries to figure out what's happening. His hand grabbed my wrist fast, not hard enough to hurt me like he was careful not to hurt me, but hard enough that the blade wasn't going anywhere. "Lyra." I stopped breathing. It wasn't the blade or the grip that got to me. It was my name in his mouth, said soft and sure like he'd been waiting to say it. Nobody outside my clan was supposed to know that name. Barely anyone alive knew it. "How do you know that," I said. It didn't come out as a question. It came out like an accusation. "Your mother used to say it exactly like that." His voice was rough with sleep but calm, way too calm for someone with a silver knife pressed against his neck. I shut him up immediately. "Don't talk about my mother." "She's the reason I recognized you." His grip loosened just slightly, enough that I felt the warmth of his hand more than I expected it, and that warmth crawled straight up my arm and settled somewhere behind my ribs. "You've got her eyes. I didn't think that would actually be true when they told me a Voss was coming for me tonight." My arm was shaking, and it wasn't from holding the knife steady. "You're lying," I said. "You're stalling until your guards show up." He chuckled deeply as the sound erupted from his chest. "If I wanted my guards here, I would've screamed the second you climbed through that window." He looked right at me, his eyes gold even in the low light, and I couldn't read a single thing behind them. "I've been awake since before you crossed the wall outside. I let you get this close on purpose." That should have scared me more than it did. Instead, something in my chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear at all. "Why would you do that?" "Because I wanted to see if you'd actually go through with it." That hit me harder than I expected. Every year of training I'd had was screaming at me to just finish it, push him down, stab the silver knife into his heart, and be done with it. Then get out before the bell rang again. But my hand didn't move. His thumb brushed over the pulse point on my wrist, just skin against skin, and I hated how loud my own heartbeat sounded with that one small touch. "I don't care why you wanted that," I said, and my voice cracked a little at the end, which I hated even more. "I think you do care." He tilted his head slightly, studying my face the way you study something you're trying to memorize. "Your heart's beating faster than mine right now, and I'm the one with a knife at my neck." "Shut up." "Make me." I should have hated him for saying that. Instead, I hated myself a little, because my whole body was leaning toward him instead of pulling away, close enough now that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin, close enough to smell smoke and cedar and something underneath it I didn't have a name for. Every rule I'd ever been taught said to get away from him. My body wasn't listening to a single one of them. "You don't know anything about me," I whispered. "No," he said, quiet now, his eyes dropping to my mouth for half a second before they came back up to meet mine, "but I think I'm about to." Something slammed against the door outside, hard enough to rattle it in the frame. We both froze. "MY KING!" The door burst open and two guards ran in with blades already drawn, and behind them someone was shouting down the hallway that the pack was under attack, that someone had gotten into the King's room, that every wolf in the building needed to get there right now. Torchlight spilt through the doorway, turning the room bright with orange and gold. In a split second, whatever had been building between us was broken. Kade moved faster than I thought was possible. He had me off the bed and against the back wall before the guards even fully cleared the doorway, one hand pressed flat against the stone behind me, and for a second I thought he wanted to hand me straight over to them. Then the wall behind me moved, swinging open to reveal a dark passage just wide enough for one person. I hadn't seen the hidden hinge at all. "What are you doing..." "Go." His voice wasn't calm anymore. There was something sharp in it, almost like fear, but not fear for himself. "Now, Lyra." "They're going to say you let me go. They'll say you...." "I don't care what they say." He shoved me through the gap, his hand staying wrapped around my arm one second longer than it needed to, his gold eyes locked on mine in the dark like he needed to go with to protect me. "Run. Don't stop until you're past the outer wall. They will kill you before they ask a single question, and I am not ready for that to happen." He urged me, but I hesitated. "Why are you helping me?" His jaw tightened. Behind him, the guards were shouting his name and closing in fast, and somewhere down the halls, a horn started blaring, the kind that would bring every wolf in Ashborn straight to this room within minutes "Because your mother saved my life once," he said, "and because part of me has been waiting fifteen years to find out what happened to her daughter." Then he shut the stone door in my face, and I heard him talk to his own guards like nothing had happened at all. I did not stop to think. I ran through the passage in total darkness, one hand on the wall to keep from falling, my wrist still burning where his fingers had been. I hit a door that opened onto the tree line behind the castle. Cold air hit my face, and I kept moving faster now, my bare feet tearing over roots and stone, the horn behind me still screaming through the night. I made it almost a quarter mile into the trees before I realized the horn had stopped. That was wrong. Alarms like that did not stop this fast, not unless someone called off the search, and nobody called off a search for an assassin still let loose around the pack. I slowed down, chest heaving, and that was when I heard it. I heard something moving through the trees on both sides of me. The only sound was the soft snap of branches. It was getting closer from both directions, like it had been waiting for me. I stopped dead in the middle of the path. Two pairs of eyes opened in the dark ahead of me, and they were not gold like his. They were glowing white.