Page 26 of Fated to the Alpha Warrior (The Wolf’s Forbidden Mate #1)
Aurora
I dream of ruins. Abandoned homes half-sunk into the earth, their foundations cracked. Crumbling brick walls and graffitied signs. Cars that have rusted out, green vines growing up them like stretching fingers. And all around me the smell of rot and disuse, of mourning and abandonment.
Empty. That’s what this place is, hauntingly empty. When I wake from the dream, my chest is empty too, my heart sluggishly beating a mournful rhythm.
But it’s more than that. In the dream, I’m searching for something—for someone. A figure just out of reach. One with broad shoulders and a familiar gait.
Kieran. Even in my dreams, I can’t escape him.
The image of Kieran disappearing into the mist is still fresh in my mind as I sit up. The room is dim, early morning light peeking through the blinds. Kieran’s oblivious snores fill the air.
Kieran’s drunken behavior from the night before is the first thing that flashes through my mind as I adjust to being awake and shrug the dreams off. He was possessive and territorial last night, but more than that, he was oddly affectionate.
And that look in his eyes as he touched my cheek. I could almost tell myself that he felt regret. Almost.
Our room here at Pack Quartz is shared, in part because Jacen seems to have moved half the pack into his father’s house to have a never-ending party.
What Kieran sees as irresponsible, though, I see as loneliness and fear—the young brash alpha-to-be doesn’t want to be alone.
So I put up with sharing a room with Kieran last night, our beds on opposite walls, his drunken snoring interrupting my dreams about ruins.
There’s something about the dreams that I can’t quite place. Maybe they’re the fae magic getting to me. They bother me, like a word on the tip of my tongue or a thought lurking in the back of my skull.
Moving around the room, I pick through our belongings to get the things I need to brew a hangover tea for Kieran, using the coffee maker I nabbed from the kitchen to warm some water.
Shifter metabolism being what it is, he’ll need the electrolytes first thing—and his wolf will need a little hair of the dog, which is why I throw a dash of orange bitters into the tea.
He groans as he wakes up, stretching his arms above his head. Those ice blue eyes take me in wearily, his brows drawn together as he glances at the half-opened blinds. “What time is it?”
“Later than you want to know,” I tell him, handing over the mug. “You drank a lot last night.”
As I hand Kieran the mug, our fingers brush.
A jolt of electricity shoots through me, and I quickly pull away.
His scent envelops me as I quietly observe him sip, then gulp down, the tea.
There’s something so familiar about the piney smell of him, fresh even after a night spent downing bourbon and tossing in an unfamiliar bed.
I try to hate him for it and wind up inhaling another bittersweet lungful of pine and cinnamon instead.
“What happened last night?” Kieran looks around our shared room with drawn brows. “How did I even get here? I don’t remember.”
I do. He practically passed out in the dining room, listing over to one side—all six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-forty pounds of him. No one else was volunteering, so I threw his arm around my shoulders and dragged him down the hallway.
As he stumbled beside me, sometimes half-rousing from his drunken stupor, he mumbled things.
“Didn’t want it to be like this, you know.” A burp interrupted his train of thought, and he leaned on me so hard that I nearly collapsed into the wall. “You… you’re amazing, Aurora. Just can’t… because…”
“I’m weak,” I finished for him bitterly. “Too weak to be your mate. You don’t have to tell me, Kieran.”
Getting him into the bed was a feat of strength and cleverness combined. I wound up having to move the pillows under his head because he refused to lay down right side up. Then I pulled his boots off—and his disgusting, sweaty socks—and left the rest up to him.
Unsurprisingly, he slept in his clothes. I watched him for a moment, his head listed to one side, his lips parted. In a low voice, he moaned, then mumbled, “Aurora…”
The longing inside me was so sharp that it took my breath away. I looked away from him and met my own gaze in the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the bathroom door. What I saw there made me hate myself a little.
Kieran McCade doesn’t want me, that much he’s made clear, but some part of me still wants him to.
It isn’t enough that he thinks I’m beautiful when he’s drunk, or that he sometimes mutters pieces of sentences that might amount to an apology, or worse, an explanation. I need so much more than that from him. So much that I’m never going to get.
“Hopefully I at least got some good information out of Jacen while I was drinking with him.” Groaning, Kieran sits up and motions toward the window. “Do me a favor and open those blinds? All the way.”
“Are you sure?”
“The sooner I kick my ass into gear, the better.”
What am I doing? Dana would tell me to shine a 2000 watt halogen bulb directly into his eye sockets. With gusto, I open all the blinds in the room, and watch as Kieran forces himself to wake up.
“I remember taking some notes on my phone before I got completely wasted.” Pulling it out of his pocket, he scrolls until he finds something. “Since Jacen was being so cagey about where his father went and the quarantine, I tried to get info without being too direct.”
“I did the same, although with fewer dares involving Alpha Carver’s underwear.” Kieran groans, and I smirk at him. “Those boxers looked great on your head, by the way.”
“Spare me.” He motions toward my notebook as I flip through it. “So? What do we think the real deal is?”
“Alpha Carver is hunting the fae—I thought at first he might’ve succumbed to the madness, but no one seemed worried about him being missing.”
“I found out the same. Did you get any info about the Eastern Ruins?”
Those words sends a shiver down my spine. “No, what’s that?”
“Come here.” Kieran pats the bed next to him, and I reluctantly sit down, hyper aware of how close our bodies are to each other.
“Some of the drunk idiots I talked to last night were bitching and moaning about Carver not taking them on the hunt to the Eastern Ruins. From what I gather, they’re pretty close to your ancestral homelands.
They think the fae have been hiding out there, preparing to strike when the pack is weak. ”
I shiver. “I’ve never actually seen one of the fae in the flesh.”
“Me neither. Although I’ve heard pretty nasty things. Think they really smell like armpit?” He grins, then ducks his head toward his own armpit and wrinkles his nose. “Speaking of armpits. I need a shower.”
Yawning, Kieran stretches his arms overhead, confirming for both of us that he does indeed need a shower—and confirming for me that even when he’s coated in a thin layer of his own sweat, his scent still makes my heart race and my mind do obscene things.
As he puts his arms down casually, he brushes up against me, his elbow resting behind my neck, his forearm on my shoulder.
I have to bite back a moan at the surge of warmth and arousal that goes through me at his nearness, his smell, his touch.
It’s like the mate bond inside me has flipped suddenly, going from a constant ache and pain to this yearning that’s somehow worse and wholly different.
“We should investigate,” I say, springing off the bed like my ass is on fire. “After all, we can’t trust Jacen, and all the info we’ve gotten so far is from drunks.”
Kieran’s blue eyes spark as he raises a dark brow at me. “Think you’re up for a mission so soon after a late night of drinking?”
“I’m not the one with a hangover,” I point out. “You look like something that cat dragged in, ate whole, puked, and buried.”
“Ouch.” He puts his hand to his chest in a faux wounded motion. “You wound me, Aurora.”
I shiver at the deep rumble of his sleep-filled voice saying my name. It’s unfair—so incredibly, mind-numbingly unfair that he looks good hungover, with bedhead and a five o’clock shadow, his massive hand splayed on his muscular chest and a far-too-charming shit-eating grin on his face.
I refuse to think of him as my mate. That way lies danger. “Let’s just get ready and head out. You take the bathroom first… I’ll pack and grab some fresh supplies while you’re in the shower.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Bossy.” Standing slowly, he yawns and stretches his arms overhead, rolling his wrists.
Then he groans and twists to either side.
The movement of his body reveals stretches of tanned skin everywhere: his neck, his shoulders, his lower back and, god in heaven, his rippling abs.
I’ve tried not to look each time he shifts between forms. It would be temptingly easy—shifters aren’t really known for shame around our nude forms. But no matter how careful I am, I get glimpses from the corner of my eyes.
Miles of gloriously smooth skin, broad shoulders, an impossibly muscular chest. Kieran McCade is unfairly handsome, and he has no business looking as good as he does.
As Kieran disappears into the bathroom, I start gathering our supplies and packing them up.
My mind wanders to last night, to the way Kieran looked at me, how he touched my face.
The memory sends warmth and longing pooling in me, and I shake my head to clear it.
I can’t afford to get distracted, not now.
When Kieran emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered and looking too good for someone nursing a massive hangover, I’m packed and ready to go.
“Let’s do this,” I say, heading for the door.
As we step into the hallway, I hear whispers. Pack Quartz members are huddled in small groups, gossiping and nursing their own hangover cures. A few look at us curiously, and in the morning light with their minds clear, their gazes are a little too penetrating for me.
“I thought he didn’t have a mate,” I hear one say as I pass, followed by a hissed, “ Hush. He doesn’t.”
“So why are they sharing the same room?”
“I’ve heard she’s his father’s bastard child—that makes them siblings, you know.”
“Did you see the way she looked at him? As if she has a chance. That’s Kieran McCade, you know—he’ll be alpha of Pack Jade.”
“They’re together. They shared a room, they came in together. I bet he’s just waiting to make it official.”
When I don’t overhear snippets of conversation, I hear them go silent instead, and eyes seem to avoid me everywhere we go. As the anger, resentment—and worst of all, pain—wells up inside me, Kieran’s freshly showered scent at my back just makes me more and more frustrated.
It isn’t fair. I didn’t pick this for myself, didn’t choose this mission, or this man . It was all chosen for me, and now I’m the subject of gossip and the punchline of a joke. My cheeks burn with embarrassment and anger as we step out onto the curving front drive, where my motorcycle awaits.
Whirling on Kieran, I glare up on him. He looks just as uncomfortable as I feel, although I doubt he’s this hurt.
“The way those shifters were gossiping in there… why haven’t you told them that you rejected me?” My voice trembles with barely suppressed emotion. “Or is it more convenient to go along with the rumors? To let them think that we’re together?”
His eyes flash with guilt, a small and hollow victory. I can’t quite decipher the other emotions that follow in its wake. He opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, an alarm sounds through the pack lands.
A howling alarm, to be exact.
I hear their mournful, enraged, alarmed tones go up. The howl is carried through the air from one voice to another, until it reaches our ears. I can’t explain how I know what it means, but some innate part of me can decipher the distress call: Fae have been spotted nearby.
Kieran doesn’t sound that regretful as he says, “This will have to wait.”
In an instant, our personal drama is set aside. We’re moving, racing toward the sound of the alarm. I jump on my bike as Kieran seamlessly shifts. The tension is still there, but for now, we have a job to do.