Page 2 of The Forbidden Alpha

The same relief lived in them, raw and unguarded, and for one moment—one single suspended moment—everything else ceased to exist. My fingers twitched to touch him. Every feeling I’d pressed down for months rose at once, flooding my throat: My rock. My love. My home. He’d come.

He took a step toward me.

And then stopped.

The color drained from his face. His jaw fell open. His gaze—those eyes that had just held mine with such certainty—went wide with something I had never seen in them before.

Fear.

My gaze dropped. A hand. Outstretched. Steady. Pulsing with the rhythm of the heart it had ripped from his ribs.

My mouth fell open. My soul made a sound it had no voice for.

The mate bond didn’t break slowly—it snapped, a sound I felt in every nerve I had, and I was on the floor before I understood I’d fallen. Wet grass seeped into my clothes. The sound around me morphed, like voices heard underwater. I stared, unable to look away—even as my own life drained out through the wound where he used to live inside me.

Footsteps approached.

A shadow fell over me.

There was a thud at my side and then a hand closed in my hair, wrenching me back. I stared into my mate’s face one last time, his expression slack, his chest a ruin, before my head met a hard rock.

And then: nothing.

Chapter 1

Adea

The alarm jolted me from my misery. A migraine gnawed at my temple. The pulsing was a hammer to the skull and the smell of death lingered in the air like a battlefield I couldn’t quite remember. I surfaced from the dream the way I always did, gasping, my hand pressed flat against my chest as if I could hold something in that was already gone. The phantom pain lived there, below my collarbone, over my heart. It usually faded within minutes. Not today.

The Goddess gave and the Goddess took, and somewhere between the two, I’d decided to hate Her for it.

She’d shaped every wolf with a piece of Herself, or so the elders always said—a second soul stitched into the first, meant to keep us honest when we couldn’t trust ourselves. Mine had been cut out before I was old enough to remember having it. Wherever it went, someone else was walking around with two souls instead of one, and I was the only wolf in Half Moon Kingdom who understood what it meant to be unfinished.

I found my phone on the floor. In this castle, sleeping in was a luxury I hadn’t earned, and the Alpha’s hunger waited for no one. I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out the window in the cramped room he’d assigned me ten years ago when he decided not to have me killed. They usually killed rogues because the outcasts went rabid or feral on their own, but I guess they thought I was a special case.

The walls were white. They were always pristine here, even in a room allocated to a dead girl walking.

Goddess. I knew how I sounded, but there I was, waking before everyone else. A stray allowed to breathe their air, eat their food, and sleep under their roof on the condition I remained useful. The pack members of Half Moon Kingdom never allowed me to forget it. We all had wolves crawling beneath our skin and law stated I should have been dead.

I dragged myself from the thin, but warm mattress, the cold floor biting at my feet. I pulled on my worn jeans and black hoodie, dressing in the dark, keeping the sounds minimal. On the shelf above my bed, the bag of pretty clothes Mavy had bought me sat untouched, sneering at me. Silk and lace I had no business wearing. It was a gift that weighed more like a bribe for a soul I wasn’t sure I still owned.

A heavy, impatient knock shook the door frame.

In the tiny mirror, I pulled my hair back to reveal the damage: chocolate tangles, bloodshot eyes, and a hollowness around my jaw that hadn’t been there a year ago. I resembled a raccoon, and no amount of cold water could wash away the fact I was running on fumes and fear.

“I’m here,” I said, my voice cracked and rasping.

Gabe filled the frame the way he always did. He was a foot taller than me, his blue eyes bright with the remnants of a night I’d be hearing about soon. He filled out his white t-shirt and slacks, his hair flopped over his brow. He smelled of forest floor and someone else’s heat. His full pearly smile appeared on cue, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes this morning. He stretched out a hand and placed one little red-foiled square on the shelf beneath the mirror and I snatched the dark chocolate up and inhaled it.

His blue eyes moved over my face the way they always did—reading me. Whatever he found there made the smile shift into a subtle softness for a second before he buried it under something ridiculous.

“Morning, Ady baby. You know I love you, but honesty really is the best policy, and I have to tell you, well, you look like shit,” he chuckled, watching me goblin-munch the last of it.

“Thank you, Gabe. I hadn’t noticed.” Sarcasm was a thin veil for the exhaustion. I crumbled up the little foil and pushed it into my pocket.

He was filling the quiet with drivel so stupid I had no choice but to return to myself. Last week it had been the way Alpha Jaxon failed miserably at parallel parking. The week before, a detailed retelling of how he thought Devin wanted him.

He chuckled as I shoved a notebook into my bag for the Academy—another gray building where I’d spend the day pretending I wasn’t a heartbeat away from being cast out.