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“I am your alpha.” Augustus seems to grow four feet taller, looming over me, his shoulders and face blocking out what feeble light managed to filter in through the clouds and the snow and the foliage above us. “You will listen to me, Mylah.”
“You are not my alpha,” I insist, jutting out my chin, glaring right back at him. He blinks once, hard, in shock that his compelling didn’t work on me. I don’t understand it—I’ve seen alphas fold people to their knees, make them lay prone on their bellies, begging for mercy.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not afraid of him. I know, somewhere deep in my soul, that he wouldn’t hurt me. He would never. And maybe that is a stupid sentiment coming from the false mating attachment. It could be just another thing that’s about to get me killed.
Wanting to pet the cute alpha king, just like I wanted to pet the bear cub.
It could also be that, as a fringe omega living outside any pack, he can’t compel me as easily. But he’s still an alpha, and I’m still an omega. It doesn’t make sense that I can stand up to him like this.
I realize, after a second, that Augustus has gone completely still, his gaze locked somewhere south of my eyes. I also realize that somewhere in this little stand-off of ours, we’ve gotten close enough to press our chests together.
The contact is electric. Completing a circuit so the energy can finally travel the way it’s meant to, all lights flicking on.
When his eyes flit to mine again, his pupils are damn near fully blown out.
My heart skips. It feels just like the moment at the club. Him looking at me like this, like he has to have me. The weight of something between us so real I could reach out and touch it.
But it’s not real.
It can’t be.
How could he have walked away, all those years ago? Left me like that, if I was his fated mate? Isn’t that supposed to be impossible? And how could he have looked at me without a note of recognition in his eyes at the festival?
Amidst all the other feelings roiling inside me is a big cloud of confusion. I just don’t understand anything—I don’t understand what I’m doing here. I thought I understood what was happening with Augustus—a false mating in which I felt it, but he didn’t,
But why would he run out here to save me? Why would he have saved me in the first place? Why does he keep coming to see me, pretending to conduct a false interrogation he knows would yield no results?
“Aug!”
My questions—and our physical contact—are cut off abruptly when someone comes crashing through the brush, having just shifted out of their wolf form. It’s one of the shifters who was there the night I was almost sacrificed. He has a shock of light, curly brown hair and a friendly face.
“Zade,” Augustus says, and I don’t miss the way he steps away from me but still keeps himself between me and the other alpha king. “What are you—”
“We need you,” the other king—Zade—says, his eyes flicking between me and Augustus. Clearly, he has questions about what was just happening here, but they must not be as important as whatever was going on.
A second later, two of the guards from Augustus’s castle come crashing through, disrupting the snow on the low evergreen bushes.
“Sir,” they bark in unison, instantly bowing their heads. “Our apologies. We have no idea how she got out—”
“Take her back.” Augustus’s voice is hard, and even though I look right at him as he walks away from me, he doesn’t glance back. “And this time, don’t let her out of your fucking sight.”
Just like that, he and the other king are shifting and sprinting away.
Chapter 16 - Augustus
Zade and I run hard, catching up with Brack at the boundary line between the neutral zone and the Northern pack.
Even at our top speed, we don’t catch up with Denvil, so it’s just the three of us sprinting after him. I’m grateful for the fact that, in this form, our communications are limited to ear twitches and nose pointing. Simple directives of where we’re going, when to slow or speed.
That means I don’t have to explain the way I fled our meeting, and I don’t have to talk to Zade about that scene with Mylah in the forest.
Together, the three of us run—something we’ve been doing since we were pups, the rhythm of our paws hitting the ground as familiar to me as the smell of my own home. Back when we were kids, we’d be sent out of the house all the time to hunt together. Once a month, on the full moon, it’d be the four of us and our fathers.
A perfect chance for us to realize that we all faced the same impossible expectations, though specifics varied for each of us. It brought us closer, hunting together. And later, when we’d be settling down in our tents, we’d talk about how things would be when we took over. When we were the four kings.
Our fathers brokered the peace between our four packs, brought us together to be Kault. And we would take things further—cementing that allyship and making things better for all the pack members.
Twenty years later, here we are, running together again. Except this time, the stakes are much higher, and Denvil is out ahead of us, presumably because this has something to do with his territory.
