She Belongs To The Beast

5.The Alpha's Rage

She walked me to my room, pointed at the door, said Alpha Cain will send for you and left. I waited and counted to thirty after the sound of her footsteps disappeared before I walked back out.

The house had a logic to it, and I followed the voices in my head through it until I found a side door that opened onto a narrow stone path running along the outer wall. I walked toward the front of the house where the gates were.

I found shadow deep enough to stand in, and I looked.

Damon was on the other side of the iron gates with his hands wrapped around the bars and his negotiating voice on, the one I had heard a hundred times at pack gatherings when he wanted something and was trying not to look desperate.

Cain stood on the inside of the gates with his hands at his sides. He looked at Damon with a snarl, an expression far from respect.

“She was transferred as part of the submission agreement,” Cain said. “Your Alpha’s signature is on the document.”

“I want her back,” Damon gritted out. “Name your price.”

“She isn’t for sale.”

“Everything has a price.”

“Not Sera.”

Damon’s jaw tightened. His knuckles went white against the bars. “You don’t understand what she is. There are people who have been watching her for years. I put her name on that list to keep her close to power, to keep her safe, because when her wolf wakes up they will come for her and she needs—”

“You put my name on a list,” I said.

I had not decided to speak. My feet had carried me out of the shadow before my brain caught up, and now I was standing in the open with the gate lights reaching me and Damon’s grey eyes finding me and going through about four expressions in two seconds.

“Sera—”

“You sat down with your alpha," I said, and my voice was shaking, but I kept going, “and you wrote my name on a piece of paper. You were in your room with Elena, and then you went and wrote my name on a list and called it keeping me safe"?

“Baby, I was protecting you—”

“From what?” My voice cracked open. “From you? Because that’s the only thing I needed protecting from, Damon. You. Two years and you—” I stopped. “You didn’t even tell me. You just handed me over and climbed back into bed with her.”

“SERA.” He slammed his hands against the bars, and the sound rang out sharp and metallic in the night air. “The crimson moon is coming. Your wolf is waking up. When it comes fully, they will come for you, every pack that has been waiting for a White Wolf, and if you are not positioned correctly, you will not survive it. I was trying to—”

A hand closed around my arm. Cain’s fingers wrapped around my forearm and pulled me away from the gates and toward the house in one movement. I stumbled, but he didn’t slow down.

I looked back once. Damon was still at the gates, shouting something, but the distance was growing, and Cain’s pace made the words dissolve into the cold air behind us.

We moved past a doorway where Mira appeared and then immediately disappeared. Cain pushed me into a chair before releasing my arm. He stepped back and turned to face me and I understood immediately that I had profoundly miscalculated something.

He was not the controlled, compressed version of anger.

His anger took up the whole room; it changed the temperature and the quality of the air and made the space between us feel dangerous.

His chest was moving. His jaw was set so hard I could see the muscle jumping in it.

He looked at the wall behind my head because looking directly at me seemed to be something he was not doing right now, and I did not know if that was better or worse.

“You were told,” he said, and his voice was low and rough in a way it had not been before; it sent shivers down my spine. “to go to your room.”

“I heard voices and I—”

“You went to the gates!” he thundered.

“I just wanted to know what—”

“You disobeyed me.” He gritted out. “On my territory. After I specifically—” He stopped. His hand came up and pressed flat against the wall beside my head, and he still was not looking at me, his jaw working, and I was not breathing properly anymore.

“Do you understand what could have happened? Do you have any—” Another stop. Like the words were not adequate, and he knew it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I was genuinely frightened.

His eyes came to mine then. That was significantly worse than when he was looking at the wall.

His hand moved from the wall to my throat, and it was not slow and it was not gentle, and I felt every individual finger find its place against my skin, his palm warm against my pulse. I was pinned between him and the wall with nowhere to go.

“You do not leave this house,” he said, very quietly, “without my knowledge. You do not go to the gates. You do not put yourself in a position where someone on the other side of my walls can see you or speak to you or—”

“You’re hurting me,” I forced out; it was getting harder to breathe with how tightly he held me.

His hand loosened immediately, like the words had gotten somewhere past the anger before he could stop them.

His fingers stayed, but the pressure released, and the change was so sudden and so complete that something shifted in his expression, something that crossed his face fast and was gone before I could name it.

He was still close. Our noses were so close I thought they would touch.

I felt hot. His thumb feathered my jaw, and his eyes had dropped from mine to somewhere around my mouth. He swallowed hard and moved his eyes back up, and what was in them then I could not read except that it made my breath come out uneven and ragged.

His hand dropped and he stepped back. Two deliberate steps, like he was putting something between himself and whatever had just happened in the last ten seconds. I wondered if he also felt hot.

“Go to your room,” he said. His voice was different now. Still controlled, but the roughness in it had not fully resolved. “And do not come out until I send for you.”

I did not look back. I ran down the corridor and into my room, and I closed the door behind me. I stood still in the dark and pressed my own hand to my throat where his hand had been, not because it hurt, but because the warmth of him was still there.

I rested on the door and slid down until I was sitting on the floor with my knees to my chest and the cedarwood smell of him still in the air around me.

I had never understood what people meant when they said someone left a mark without touching you. Sitting on the cold floor with my back against the door, I was starting to.