Alpha's Beta, My Forbidden Mate

Chapter 7: He Stepped From the Shadows

Nobody slept.

Elara noticed that first. The shelter had enough space for sitting and not much else, and as the hours moved from late to very late to the gray edge of early morning, no one suggested sleeping. Torvin read from a small book he had produced from somewhere inside his coat. The young man against the wall, whose name she had still not caught, sat with his eyes open and his attention pointed at the ceiling. Anya sat close to Elara with her shoulders against the wall and her eyes doing that listening thing at intervals.

Liam sat nearest the steps.

He did not read. He did not close his eyes. He sat with his forearms on his knees in the same position she had first seen him on the fallen log and he was very still and he was thinking very hard about something he was not sharing.

She watched him for a while. Not continuously. In the way she watched things she was trying to understand, in glances, building a picture from pieces.

The torn jacket. The thing on his jaw that was definitely blood, dried now, a thin line along the angle of his cheekbone. The way he had come down those steps and found her face before he did anything else.

She looked at the carved wooden marker on the floor between them. Nobody had touched it since Torvin identified it. It sat there like a word in a language she was still learning to read.

"Kade sent wolves to find me," she said. Not loudly. Just into the quiet.

Liam looked at her.

"Yes," he said.

"He knew where I was."

"He has known for about four days. We became aware he knew approximately two days after that."

"And you have been aware of me for how long."

A pause. Longer than the others.

"Three weeks," he said.

She absorbed that. "Since I arrived."

"Before you arrived. We knew you were coming to this area. We did not know exactly when."

"Because of my mother. Because of what Torvin told me."

"Yes."

She looked at the ceiling. Stone and earth and old timber, the weight of the forest above them. "So Kade knows what I am."

"He knows what you carry. The bloodline. What it means in terms of power." Liam's voice was even but she was developing a sense for what lived underneath the evenness. "He does not know you. He does not care to."

"He only cares about what he can take from me."

"Yes."

She sat with that for a moment. The particular loneliness of being wanted for something you did not choose to carry.

"Tell me about him," she said.

Liam was quiet for long enough that she thought he was going to redirect. Then he said, "We grew up together. Our fathers were allies. We trained together from the time we were children." He looked at his hands. "He became Alpha six years ago. The transition was not clean."

"What does that mean."

"It means the wolf who held the position before him did not intend to give it up." He paused. "And Kade did not wait for intention."

She looked at him. "He killed the previous Alpha."

"In a challenge. Which is legal under pack law." He said it without inflection. The voice of someone who had made peace with a fact they did not like. "The challenge was not entirely clean either. But pack law does not require cleanliness. It requires a winner."

"And Kade won."

"Kade always wins. That is the problem." He looked up. "He is very good at identifying what he wants and removing whatever stands between him and it. He is less good at understanding why some things should not be taken."

"Things like me."

"People like you," he corrected. Quiet but immediate.

She looked at him across the low-lit space.

That was not a small distinction. She understood that he understood that. She filed it.

"Why are you telling me this," she said.

"Because you asked."

"Most people in your position would manage the information. Give me enough to cooperate and hold the rest back."

"I am aware of that."

"But you're not doing it."

He held her gaze. "No."

"Why."

The question sat between them. He did not look away from it.

"Because you have spent your entire life being managed," he said. "People deciding what you were ready to know. What you could handle. What was better kept from you." Something shifted in his expression. Not pity. Something more useful than pity. "Your mother died before she could tell you the truth. Your foster family did not know the truth to tell you. And every instinct you have ever had about yourself, every sense that you were different, that you were missing something, that you were not quite what everyone around you was, has gone unconfirmed for twenty-six years." He paused. "I am not going to manage you."

The shelter was very quiet.

Anya was looking at the far wall with the deliberate attention of someone giving two people privacy they did not technically have.

Elara looked at Liam.

"How do you know how long," she said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that.

"How do I know how long you have felt that way?"

"Yes."

He reached into his jacket. Not the torn one, a different layer beneath it. He produced a small envelope, creased at the edges, the paper old enough to have gone soft. He set it on the floor between them, beside the wooden marker.

"Your mother left this with Torvin," he said. "Twenty-three years ago. When she came to us." He looked at it. "He has been carrying it since."

She looked at Torvin.

The old man lowered his book. His sharp eyes were quiet for once. He gave her a single nod.

She picked up the envelope.

Her name was on the front.

Not her full name. Just Elara. In handwriting she had never seen before, slanted slightly left, the letters of a person who wrote quickly and with intention.

Her hands were not entirely steady.

She opened it.

One page. Both sides. The handwriting was the same throughout, quick and slanted and absolutely certain of itself.

She read it.

She read it twice.

She did not read it aloud and no one asked her to.

When she looked up Liam was watching her with those gold eyes and the expression she had spent three days trying to name and she finally had it. It was the expression of someone witnessing a moment they had been prepared for and were still not prepared for.

"She knew," Elara said. Her voice came out different. She let it. "Not about me specifically. But she knew that someday there would be someone. That the bloodline would surface again." She looked at the letter in her hands. "She wrote this for whoever that person turned out to be."

"Yes," Torvin said from across the shelter.

"She wrote it for a stranger."

"She wrote it for her child," Torvin said. "She did not know she was already carrying one. But she wrote it as if she did." He paused. "Mothers often know things before the knowing is possible."

Elara folded the letter carefully. Put it in her jacket pocket. Against her chest.

She looked at Liam.

"What does the bloodline actually do," she said. "Not the version where you tell me it is powerful and important. The real version."

He glanced at Torvin.

"Tell her," Torvin said.

Liam leaned forward slightly. "The Luna Prime bloodline is the oldest supernatural lineage in existence. It predates the pack system. It predates every law and structure we have built." He kept his eyes on hers. "The woman it surfaces in has the ability to awaken a True Alpha. Not through politics or challenge. Through the mating bond itself." He paused. "A True Alpha is not simply a strong Alpha. It is something the supernatural world has not seen in over a century. A leader whose power and authority are absolute and whose legitimacy no wolf can challenge or deny."

She let that settle.

"And Kade wants that," she said.

"Kade wants to be unchallengeable," he said. "He wants a power no one can take from him. Your bloodline is the only path to that which exists in the world."

"So he wants to use me."

"Yes."

"To make himself into something no one can stop."

"Yes."

She looked at him. At the gold eyes and the torn jacket and the dried blood on his jaw and the man who had stood between her and the forest on three separate occasions without being asked.

"And you," she said. "What do you want."

The question landed differently than she intended. Or exactly as she intended. She was not sure yet.

He held her gaze.

He did not answer.

Not because he did not have an answer.

She could see it in his face, the answer was right there, sitting just behind those eyes, large and certain and apparently too significant for a stone shelter at four in the morning.

Before he could find a way to say it or decide not to, the young man against the wall sat up straight.

"Someone is above us," he said.

Every person in the shelter went still.

Anya's head tilted.

Liam was on his feet.

Three seconds of absolute silence.

Then the knock came from above. Not the pattern Liam had used earlier. Different. Two short. One long. A pause. Two short again.

Torvin closed his book.

"That is Rylan's signal," he said. He said it without relief. He said it the way you said a name when you were not sure yet whether it was good news or bad news wearing a familiar face.

Liam looked at the door above them.

He looked at Elara.

Something passed through his expression so fast she almost missed it.

Almost.

"Stay here," he said.

He went up the steps and through the door before she could respond.

She counted to four.

Then she followed him.

Anya grabbed her wrist. "He said"

"I know what he said." She looked at Anya. "I am done being managed."

Anya stared at her for half a second.

Then she let go.

Elara went up the steps and through the earth door and into the gray pre-dawn of the forest and stopped.

Liam was six meters away. Standing in the trees. He was not alone.

The man facing him was lean and sandy-haired with the kind of face that had been handsome before something heavy settled on it. He was speaking quietly and quickly. His hands were at his sides but his posture was the posture of a person who had rehearsed this conversation several times and still was not sure of it.

Liam was listening.

His back was to her but she could see his shoulders and his shoulders were telling her something was wrong.

The sandy-haired man saw her over Liam's shoulder.

His expression changed.

Not surprise. Recognition.

He had known she would be here.

Liam turned.

He looked at her. Then back at the man. Something tightened in his face.

"Elara," he said. His voice was careful in the new way it got when something mattered. "This is Rylan."

Rylan looked at her with those guilty eyes.

He said, "I am sorry."

She looked between them. "Sorry for what."

Rylan looked at Liam.

Liam looked at the forest behind Rylan.

And then Elara heard it. What Liam had already heard. What his expression had already processed.

Movement. In the trees. Surrounding them. Not one direction.

All directions.

"Rylan," Liam said. Very quiet. "How far behind you are they."

Rylan closed his eyes.

"They were already here," he said. "Liam. I am so sorry. They were already here when they sent me ahead."

Liam turned to Elara.

The gold in his eyes was back. Bright and old and absolute.

He said one word.

"Run."