Page 7 of Moon Cursed

“I’m counting on it,” I said before opening the door and stepping out into the morning light.

Her other alphas were precisely what my mate needed.

And they were going to fix this… one way or another.

SHADOW

A few moments earlier…

The Hunters were here.

We all knew the legend. But to smell their metallic scent on the horizon struck fear into my cold heart.

That was a particular emotion I wasn’t used to experiencing. As the Alpha’s son of the Midnight Pack, I’d been subjected to a grueling training regiment even as a pup.

We weren’t like the other packs. We believed that our wolves were a curse, and to control them, we needed to burn out anything that might feed our animalistic side.

Which meant we weren’t supposed to feel.

I’d been trained to kill without mercy the moment I’d started to show signs of my first shift.

I’d also been tortured, for lack of a better word, on an annual basis.

That torture had taken a new form this year.

Not because of the death of my father. He had been a heartless brute and my mother would be glad that he was gone.

Instead… I had emotions I didn’t know what to do with.

I’d been taught not to feel at all.

But now that a human had touched my wolf, he was pushing all of his feelings onto me. Our rejected mate’s push into heat continued to waft her delicious aroma into the air. It mixed with the tinge of blood, making me dizzy with the competing emotions.

Desire.

Need.

Anger.

Frustration.

… Fear.

A new enemy was on the horizon and a mate I had rejected was trapped behind an invisible wall on another pack’s desolate land.

While she shifted and called us with her heat.

I couldn’t respond to her call even if I wanted to.

Alphas surrounded me—ones that I did not trust—but they were the enemy I knew.

So I would keep them close. For now.

“We work together,” the Valiance Alpha insisted. Vern was his name. I hadn’t intended on staying long enough to learn names, but it seemed that this would be more than just a brief visit.

His bright green eyes found mine and he gave me a hard stare.

It was a challenge among our kind to make eye contact like that, but I would allow it for now.