Page 3 of Cruel Alpha (Nightfire Islands Alphas #1)

Alyssa stared at me, frozen in place, as if she was a rabbit and I was a feral dog. She’d changed so much and so little since I’d last seen her; her dark brown hair still fell in unruly curls over her shoulders, her face was still soft and heart-shaped, her lips still full and pink and tempting, and her scent was still that light and comforting mix of vanilla and jasmine flowers. Her eyes, though—her hazel eyes were harder now. She didn’t fear me as she once had, didn’t gaze up at me with the mixture of apprehension and desire that I’d once found so intoxicating. Alyssa wasn’t a girl anymore; she was a woman, and that woman had far more to fear than me.

Her grip was tight on the two kids in her arms, and I did my best not to look at them; if I thought too hard about someone else kissing her, touching her, knotting her, I was going to go feral, and that wasn’t what we needed right now. What we needed was for Alyssa to get up and move.

“We don’t have time for this,” I growled. That got her attention, and her expression shifted from shock to anger. I braced myself to be cussed out, but when she spoke, her voice was sweet and cheerful.

“Gee,” she said. “I’m so sorry for not running to bend to your whim. We’re kind of in shock over here, so if you could give us a gosh darn minute, that would be great!”

She still looked as though she wanted to kill me, but only for as long as she deigned to give me her attention, which was all of about three seconds before she turned back to the toddlers in her arms, cooing and fussing over them. I stood there, naked, staring in disbelief. I wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, and I didn’t think I’d ever been dismissed by anyone but my father. I ought to leave her there, sitting on her ungrateful ass in the mud with her totaled car and her whining brats.

I didn’t, though. I waited, as she had asked, for exactly one minute before I said,

“You’re heading for Argent?” It was a stupid question. This road only led to the Argent Bridge.

“Yes,” she said. The “duh” was implied.

“Good,” I replied. “It’s only about another hour or so on foot through the forest. Follow me.” With any luck, we’d be over the bridge within two hours and at Leo’s door within three. Alyssa would be safe there, and then she could sass me all she wanted. I held out a hand to help her up, but she only looked at it.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” In any other situation, I might have said that was reasonable—I still couldn’t stand to think about how I’d treated her when we were teenagers—but even after everything that had passed between us, she had to know that I wasn’t about to let her get torn to shreds by the Arbor Pack.

“You’re coming with me,” I insisted, infusing my voice with Alpha authority. Alyssa did not look down, did not flinch.

“I am not,” she said, and I pushed down the growl that was growing in my chest. Mostly. I wished I could know what she was thinking, wished I could have even a little insight into what was making her so reluctant to follow me. There were a lot of reasons I regretted not marking her on the night of the party—the night I’d been weak, the night I’d given in to the pull of the bond—but I’d never regretted it more than I did right now. If I’d marked her, claimed her, then I would have been able to feel her emotions through the bond. As it was, all I could feel was the insistent pull of it, the need to have her with me.

“Alyssa—” I began, but she cut me off.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do. I’m not a member of Lapine Pack anymore, remember?” She was utterly defiant, even looking up at me from the forest floor, eyes blazing. The primal, animal part of me—the Alpha part—wanted to pin her down and remind her who was in charge, but the human part of me held back. I’d hurt her enough. The moment stretched on, neither of us wanting to back down, until a little hitched breath and a sniffle broke the silence. One of the children was crying, clawing at his mother’s shirt as he hid his face against her chest. Alyssa’s demeanor changed in an instant.

“It’s okay, Baby,” she cooed, kissing his hair. “Let’s get going, yeah?”

Finally. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“We’ll stick to the forest; it’s a more direct route, and we won’t be so exposed. Shouldn’t take more than two hours,” I said, but Alyssa only glared at me, and when she spoke, that fake cheerfulness was back.

“Did I ask you?”

She smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile; it was an animal showing its teeth. I turned away, bracing my hands against a tree trunk and squeezing. The Alyssa in my memories—in my dreams—definitely hadn’t been this aggravating. Could she not see that I only wanted to protect her?

“Let me get this straight,” I growled, my grip on the tree tightening. “I put myself between you and a dozen angry hunters—you’re welcome, by the way—and I’m trying to get you somewhere safe and warm, but you’re gonna get yourself and your kids killed instead. Just because you’re too proud to accept my help.”

Alyssa didn’t respond, and for a brief moment, I thought I had finally gotten through to her. When I turned, though, she wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t looking at the kids. She wasn’t looking at anything. Her eyes had gone entirely white, with no hint of iris or pupil, and she stared straight ahead, sightless and still. I’d only ever seen her do this a few times when we were younger, but I recognized it for what it was: a vision.

“Mommy?” The little girl was patting her cheek, trying to get her attention, and I darted forward, lifting her into my arms without thinking. I didn’t know much about magic, but I knew that when a witch was having a vision, you didn’t disturb her. The girl wriggled and protested, and I tightened my grip around her waist as gently as I could. Kids might be small, but they were hell to hold onto. I was just about to lose this particular grapple when Alyssa blinked back into consciousness, gasping.

She took a few seconds to collect herself, breathing low and slow, feeling her surroundings with her free hand and squeezing her son’s leg with the other. Then she frowned.

“Why are you holding Emmy?” she asked. It wasn’t the first thing I expected her to say, and it took me aback for a second.

“Oh—she was trying to wake you up,” I explained.

“Right. Thanks.” She held out an arm to take the kid—Emmy—back, and I released her gladly. She toddled back to her mother, shooting me an irritated look as she snuggled back into Alyssa’s side. That apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree.

“What did you see?” I asked quietly. For a few long seconds, Alyssa only looked at me, frowning, then she sighed.

“You can take us to Argent.” Something inside me that had been knotted and tense eased ever so slightly. We weren’t in the clear yet, but at least she’d stopped arguing with me before I resorted to throwing her over my shoulder and hauling her over to Argent that way.

“I’m sorry?” I said, partly because I couldn’t quite believe my ears and partly just to be a tool. If the universe or God or whatever it was that powered Alyssa’s magic was intervening just to show her how stupid she was being, I wasn’t about to let her live that down.

“Argent,” she repeated, teeth gritted as if it pained her. “You can take us there.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said, snapping back into action. Now she was co-operating, we needed to get moving. “I’ll head out in front as a wolf; that way, I can do tight circles to watch every angle—”

“Woah. Woah, woah, woah,” she said, holding up a hand. Did she just shush me? Did I let her? “You’re not going anywhere in wolf form. I’ve got two kids and several bags that I can’t exactly carry myself.”

“You don’t need the bags,” I insisted. “Leo will have everything you need.”

“Will he have their favorite plushies and blankets that smell like home?” she asked, one eyebrow raised. “Didn’t think so. I’m taking their diaper bag, if nothing else, that’s got all the essentials, but I can’t carry both of them for—what is it? Seven miles?”

It was closer to eight, and I saw her point. As small as the children were, they weren’t exactly babies; carrying the two of them and a bag would slow Alyssa down considerably.

“Fine,” I huffed. “I’ll take the bag and a kid.”

Alyssa’s eyes went hard again for a moment, but I didn’t have time to figure out what I’d done to offend her before she spoke:

“Are you gonna put on pants?” Her voice was accusatory, as if I had chosen to be buck-ass naked in a cold forest in the middle of the night.

“Sure,” I snapped back, “let me just pull a pair out of my ass.”

“There’s some in the trunk you could wear,” Alyssa said, and my hackles rose. Alyssa might think I didn’t care about her, but surely she knew enough basic biology not to tell me she had some other dude’s pants in the back of her car, let alone ask me to wear them. I was about to tell her as much when she continued, “We could probably make a pair of my sweats fit you.”

That flipped the switch inside me entirely. The wolf inside me was chomping at the bit to have her scent all over me, marking me as hers.

“Sure, yeah,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible.

She took a few seconds to deposit the kids on the front seat of the car and then began to scrabble in the trunk, eventually pulling out a ball of grey jersey material, which she pitched to me underhand. Catching the soft material in one hand, I had to resist the urge to bring it to my nose and inhale. The sweatpants weren’t quite dirty, but they weren’t freshly washed either, and they smelled of her: vanilla and jasmine and bright summer mornings. I’d missed that scent more than I’d allowed myself to acknowledge.

The pants were both too big and too small: the cuffs reached about an inch below my knee, while the waistband wouldn’t even keep the pants on my body if I didn’t hold them up. I might be twice the size of Alyssa, but my hips were narrow, and hers were—I wasn’t going to think about that. I was not going to think about the generous curves of her body and the way they’d felt beneath my fingers the one time I ever got to touch her. I was not going to pitch a tent in borrowed sweatpants in the middle of Arbor Woods in front of a pair of toddlers.

I fumbled with the drawstring on the sweatpants, putting it as tight as it would go and tying it off in a double knot. The pants hung off my hips, but they stayed up, just.

Embarrassed, I glanced back to Alyssa, expecting to see her hiding a laugh. Instead, her eyes were wide, pupils blown huge and black, with her mouth hanging slightly open. There was a sound coming from her chest: nowhere near a growl—perhaps something more like a purr. Clearly, the sight of me in her clothes was doing the same thing to her wolf as it was to mine.

She shook her head, blushing, before grabbing a bag out of the back seat of her car. Shoving it into my hands, she went to retrieve the now grumbling toddlers from the front seat, bending over to whisper more comfort and platitudes. When she rose, she had one on each hip, and she looked between them with a frown.

“Take Emmy,” she said after a couple of seconds, nodding her head at the little girl. I reached out for her, but the kid only leaned closer to her mother. For a second, my temper flared—we needed to go —but it wasn’t Emmy’s fault. She was only a kid, and she’d been through enough this evening already without some strange dude taking her out of the comfort of her mother’s arms.

“It’s okay,” I said, as low and as soft as possible. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I just want to help you and your mom and—” I paused, realizing I didn’t know the little guy’s name.

“Jack,” said Emmy, and I smiled at her.

“And Jack. Will you let me?”

She considered me for another long minute before she reached out her tiny, pudgy hands, and I hoisted her into my arms.

“You ready?” I asked Alyssa. She blinked a few times—she seemed a little spaced out, and I worried that she had a concussion—before she said,

“As I’ll ever be.”

If someone had asked me that morning how I’d imagined the night playing out, I would have told them that Leo and I were gonna crack open a few beers and shoot the shit. Instead, I’d found the mate I thought I’d lost forever, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her go now, even if it meant making an enemy of Arbor, even if it meant raising another wolf’s pups. With the dark forest stretching out in every direction, the distant howling of wolves tainting its quiet, the two of us began to walk.