Page 4

R owan

“Fuck,” is how she greets me after all this time. An expletive, murmured almost like a prayer.

I don’t really blame her.

But the moment I hear her voice again, I’m transported back in time to ten years ago.

She was eighteen. I was nineteen. Alina was the only daughter of Nora and Amos Sinclair, two highly respected elders in the pack.

They’d died a few years prior in a terrible altercation with the Blackburns, and Alina had left the main town in our territory to live on the outskirts with a cousin.

I hadn’t paid much attention to her when we were kids, though I did notice how pretty she was. Everyone did.

Still, I didn’t think much about her in those years that she was absent.

Those were crucial years for me, after all.

I was maturing rapidly and coming to grips with the fact that I was going to be Alpha of our pack one day.

My father took every spare moment to teach me and guide me, and yet Kseniya’s prophecy hung over my head, no matter how hard I worked to prove myself.

It was a terrible thing to say, that a future Alpha would be ruined by his own Mate.

That, because of this, the pack would suffer from the lack of a Luna.

That any children sired by the Alpha would have to be with someone who isn’t his Fated match.

The pack might have shunned the old wise woman if they didn’t already respect her so much.

After all, Kseniya had never been wrong before.

When Alina returned to town at the age of eighteen, I almost didn’t recognize her at first. Not only was she taller and made of more womanly curves than sharp angles, but she was also even more devastatingly beautiful than she’d been before.

I was instantly enamored with her. I wanted her, but I kept my distance for a couple of weeks, watching from afar as she reconnected with old friends and hung out around town with other shifters our age.

It’s not like I’d never approached a girl before, but it was still a sore spot for me to indulge those cravings when I knew that I’d never get to experience the real deal.

If I ever found my Mate, I knew what I had to do.

If it was true that she’d bring about my ruination, then that meant her very existence risked the ruination of the entire pack.

I was going to be Alpha one day. If I was ruined, everyone else would be, too.

Thus, if I ever happened to come across my Mate, I had to reject her.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy pleasure with others, though.

I thought Alina might be one of those others. I yearned for it. I felt drawn to her in a way I’d never felt before, and even knowing what I knew, I didn’t even pause to think that my desire might have meant something.

So, like a blind fool, I approached her one warm September evening at a celebratory bonfire for the autumn equinox.

The magic of my bloodline was racing through my veins, as it tends to do on important holidays that mark the shifting in seasons.

Kseniya says it’s because our pack is connected to old Celtic bloodlines.

Anyway, I blame the mysticism of the night on how stupid I was.

Long story short—I approached Alina. Her friends giggled and slipped away, knowing better than to get in the Alpha heir’s way when he’d set his sights on something. Or someone.

I flirted. She flirted back.

I smiled at her. She smiled back .

My blood was singing, and there was a scent of lilacs in the air despite the fact that we were far away from springtime. And then there was that strange tugging in the pit of my stomach, like a string had been tied to the very core of who I was, and Alina held the reins.

Somehow, I still thought nothing of it. I was nineteen. I just wanted to spend time with a pretty girl. I just wanted to be a young idiot for one night, not the shifter prince with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

I asked her if she wanted to take a walk with me. She said yes.

As soon as we were alone, something changed between us. There was a frenzy, a force so dizzying that I could barely tell the difference between up and down. That tugging sensation grew stronger, and so did my desire for her.

One thing led to another, and then we were ripping each other’s clothes off. It wasn’t my first time, but it felt like it.

And then, like a bucket of ice water, clarity washed over me. I was still buried in her, just barely catching my breath after release, when the air thickened. Something inside me unraveled, spooling outward toward Alina, and then I felt the bond locking into place between us.

Alina, who must have known all about the prophecy despite her years away, given that it was practically common knowledge among the pack from the moment of my birth, gasped as if I’d reached inside her chest and squeezed her heart with my own hand.

That was when I knew. Alina Sinclair, beloved daughter of two fallen elders, was Fated to ruin me.

So, I had to ruin her first.

It killed me to do it. Literally. Rejecting the bond was the physical and emotional equivalent of slicing a knife through my own flesh from sternum to stomach.

“This can’t happen. We can’t be together. Stay away from me.”

That’s what I told her.

It was nature for her to obey. I was born to be an Alpha, after all.

I just didn’t expect her to run away.

I thought maybe she could just go back to her cousin’s place on the outskirts of our territory.

She’d be respected, I hoped, purely by virtue of being my Mate.

Even in spite of the prophecy, her determination to stay away from me would earn the pack’s approval.

I told myself I’d do what I could to keep her safe and happy from a distance.

We couldn’t be Mates, and she’d never be my Luna, but that didn’t mean I would abandon her entirely.

She made that decision on her own. She left Greenbriar territory that same night we lay together. By morning, nobody knew what had happened to her. And when Cal, who had already sworn himself to me as Beta, scented the tattered threads of a Mating bond clinging to me, it became clear to everyone.

Now, here she is, ten years older. I didn’t think it’d be possible, but she’s even more stunning than she was the last time I saw her. While people I barely notice are fussing around her, cleaning up the spilled coffee and shattered pot, all I can do is stare at her.

Her golden blonde hair is long, tied back in a loose braid that falls to her waist. Little pieces have escaped from the plait, curling around her face.

She looks flushed, almost feverish, her brown eyes darker than I remember.

Or maybe it’s that her pupils are blown.

Either way, I can tell that there’s something wrong with her, and even though I was the one who rejected her, there’s an innate need within me to protect her.

Except, she’s now standing so close to Henry Whiterose that one might think she’s seeking protection from him. Against me. Is that why she’s here? Did she claim amnesty with them? Did she join them?

No, that would change her scent. She’s still pure Greenbriar, through and through.

Alina swipes her hand across her forehead. I notice the light sheen of sweat. The exhausted flutter of her eyelashes.

She needs to shift. Fucking hell, how long has it been since she’s shifted? She looks like she’s been denying her nature for months. Honestly, she shouldn’t even be standing upright at this point. But why would she do that to herself? As far as I knew, Alina used to love being in her wolf form.

“Are you ill?” The words are out before I can stop them.

Alina’s lips part in surprise at my question, but her gaze hardens.

It’s only then that I realize they are the first words I’ve spoken directly to her in ten years .

Instead of answering, she looks down at her other hand, which has been clenching the handles of two empty mugs this entire time.

She clears her throat and addresses Henry instead of me. “Let me go get another pot for you. I’ll be right back.”

Irritation flares up my spine at the way she speaks with reverence to an Alpha that isn’t me. I choke it back down. I’m a grown man, and the Whiteroses are our allies. I don’t need to be barking at an old man over her.

Henry, who is wise and powerful enough to sense the rejected bond between us from this close proximity, knows better than to reach out and touch her in front of me. Still, he waves a hand in her general direction, and it makes my skin crawl with primal possessiveness.

“Don’t worry about it,” Henry assures her. “You really do look unwell. Zahra is right. Perhaps you should sit down?”

The curly-haired girl with dark brown skin steps toward Alina.

As she moves, the air in the restaurant shifts. A draft from a crack in a nearby window wafts through the space, stirring up the Whiterose scent and strengthening the aroma of my Mate’s telltale scent.

Yet, still, it’s easy enough to tell that she and I are not the only Greenbriars in here.

Alina’s breath catches, as if she knows what I’ve picked up on.

My eyes flash to hers. “Who else is here?”

When she left the pack, she was alone. Nobody went with her. No one knew that she intended to leave in the first place. One minute, she was there. The next minute, she wasn’t. She had no accomplices, and she was also very good at covering her own scent, which made her impossible to track.

Not that I didn’t try. In spite of Kseniya’s prophecy, and against my father’s advice to simply let her go, I spent years trying to find her.

Whenever I could get away from the pack, I’d run far and wide, going deeper into the Appalachians in one direction and all the way to the Atlantic in the other.

I had to be careful not to infringe on established shifter territory, though, and I never imagined that Alina would hide among another pack. That was my mistake. One of many.

I knew I couldn’t have her. I knew that she was destined to ruin me. But I couldn’t just let her disappear. In recent years, however, I’d started to give up hope that I’d ever see her again.

Fate has interesting timing.

“Ah,” says Henry, soft and thoughtful. He nods to himself, gaze flicking from me to Alina, and then to a spot just past her. “I see.”

Alina straightens her spine, shrugging off her curly-haired friend’s touch.

I glance at the Alpha, but he’s frowning at something in the far corner of the restaurant.

No, not something. Someone.

I rise to my feet, pushing the chair back roughly as I gaze past the curious onlookers and see a young boy slumped down lazily in a chair at a table mostly concealed by shadows and the bulk of the curving bar.

“No,” I think I hear Alina say.

The boy is maybe eight or nine years old. Scrawny, but with the awkwardly long limbs of a kid who will be much taller in a couple of years. He has dark hair and pale skin, and Alina’s pert little nose. He’s completely unaware of my stare, absorbed in what looks like a vintage comic book.

My shifter sight kicks in as I drink in the details from a distance.

Blue eyes the exact same color as mine. The slight indent of a dimple on his left cheek as he mindlessly chews his bottom lip. I had a dimple there, too, before my face fully matured.

And more than that, there is an undeniable familiarity in his scent, in his very aura.

The boy is my son.

Alina was pregnant when she ran from me.

And that child over there, still too small to have experienced his first shift, is the second heir to the Greenbriar bloodline.