Page 53

Cain’s POV

I walk toward my men, finally free, dragging my bloody sword that cut more heads today than in its lifetime… and that's when I see her.

My wife, my Luna, my heart.

“Atlas!” my Beta is shouting, and they both catch her arms at the last second before she collapses between them. Head falling loosely, strawberry hair dripping with blood, just like the rest of her body, neck, midriff, hands, legs…

I want to run to her, kneel before her, catch her, hug her, hold her… but I can’t. I have the war to end and she is in good hands.

So, I turn around and yell commands on the left and right, all my warriors strong and wanting to fight—my fragile Asher the only one who seems to have any real wounds. They shouldn’t have brought her here. They shouldn’t have…

‘ Why did you let her come here? ’ I mind-link my Beta, slowly but finally coming back to my supernatural abilities after injecting myself with gallons of wolfsbane. ‘ You should’ve known better. ’

‘ She is the one that was dragging all of us, Alpha. She’s the one who saved you. She’s the one they all fight for right now. ’

I mindlessly sink my sword in another Unwanted and look around at my warriors, all bloodthirsty, all in… mourning? What happened to her?

I turn around to look at my wife again. I can feel where she is, but I can’t see her over the wall of my best officers. Standing there, protecting her instead of helping me.

I don’t need help, not anymore, not now with all my warriors fighting for me with this power they’ve never possessed before, but it’s still strange they chose her… What happened when I was gone?

‘Does she need me there ?’ I ask my Beta, my heart in there with him, with her, not in the battle where it should be.

‘ End the war, ’ he growls back and forces the end of the mind link.

I want to stab him for this insubordination, but I know better.

I stay where I am. I command, I plan, I fight. I take them over until there’s no one left to take or fight or kill and it's a different day, a different night, a different blood-stained land…

I drag my sword loosely in my right hand, walking back to the South, ignoring all the cheering my warriors make. The leader of the Unwanted is alive and well, but she doesn’t have anyone valuable to lead anymore.

I struggle to connect mind-link with my Gamma, proving that they are not anywhere close. But I keep trying until it works at last.

‘Where is my wife? ’ I ask Atlas with no patience left in my voice. I’m dying to know.

‘ In the Castle, Cain… hurry up. ’

He hasn't called me by my name since we were kids. I should make him pay for not calling me Alpha, but it sounds weirdly intimate and I’m suddenly more worried about my wife than when I was seeing her all bloody in the middle of the battlefield.

‘ What’s going on? ’ I ask again.

‘ Hurry up, just hurry up .’

I’m already running and it’s not enough.

‘Officer Rein, I need to be at the pack house right now! ’ I shout through my mind-link to him as soon as I catch him in the crowd.

‘ Yes, sir! ’ He runs over to me and outreaches his hand. ”You need to shift, Alpha, and go in that direction, jumping over Blood River in a few miles.”

I give him my sword and stop to take off everything I have on me. I draw on my primal power that was subdued the last few days after that inhuman amount of wolfsbane. It is there and grows in strength when I call for it.

Finally, I shift with the roar and run as fast as my royal part-Lycan wolf form possibly can.

“Where is Asher? Where’s my Luna?!” I shout while running into the Packhouse Castle.

I’m all naked and dirty, but I don’t care… I feel something is wrong.

“Hospital wing” Gamma Atlas runs to me, ready with a robe because I mind-linked him when I was close.

I storm off and don’t slow down until I push her hospital room doors with all my strength. They break, but I don’t fucking care.

There she is. Laying on the bed, unconscious, IV drip stuck into one hand, the other is held by my beta.

And maybe that’s what is most disturbing of all.

He hates her. But both of his big hands are squeezing her small one, his forehead leaned over. He looks like he’s praying and I’m suddenly aware I’m just standing in the middle of the room, staring at the scene, paralyzed.

I specifically told these morons I will be so drugged on wolfsbane I wouldn’t feel if anything will be happening to her, so they would know to be extra careful. Not fucking drag her into the battle they didn’t even have to start.

“Alpha!” the doctor rushes inside with Atlas, who must have gone for him. “Luna is in critical condition, and her wolf doesn’t seem to heal her anymore, probably too shocked after the miscarriage—”

“Miscarriage?” I ask dryly because that’s the first time anyone mentions to me that she was even pregnant. Was she?

“Alpha, I already told Beta that we don’t have time. We need to find her true mate as soon as possible.”

“Are you kidding me?” Atlas hisses at the doctor, probably because suggesting to the Royal Alpha werewolf that only another man could save his wife is outrageous. It is, but… I don’t care.

“Okay, and how could he help her?” I ask taking slow steps to her fragile body, until I can put a hand on my Beta’s shoulder.

He gazes up at me, looking like I pulled him out of some trance.

“True mates can heal each other when they are close, even if they are not marked,” the doctor answers from a safe distance. “He would have to embrace her, skin to skin, and just be with her, I guess… I’m sorry, Alpha. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”

I nod at no one in particular, just looking at her.

“We already started cross-referencing all the Alphas before, and I asked one of the Officers to bring the papers down as soon as the doctor told me,” Beta states—staring at her hands in his. “He should be back any moment.”

I nod again, mindlessly, my eyes moving from one unhealed wound to another. There are so many…

“Waste of time, she was lying to everyone about this,” I state finally, accepting a theory I was trying to ignore for a long time.

It’s me…

I go around the bed while untying the robe.

“What?” Beta finally looks up at me. “Wait… you think that you are… seriously? Are you sure, Alpha?”

Atlas sits on the chair near him with the same taken-aback face.

“I better be fucking right about this.” I climb into the bed with her, “Help me.”

Lucifer is startled at first but then he hurriedly helps me roll her onto her left side, just like she likes to sleep. I try not to dwell on the smell of blood and all the other wounds that were hidden under the covers—until I just picked it up.

I firmly press my body to her almost naked one, and I wrap my arm around her waist to pull her to me in the same manner as always.

I lean into her neck and inhale her scent. It's just a basic werewolf smell as if someone in the hospital cleaned her with water. No cosmetics. No laundry detergent that usually makes all her clothes smell like mine. Just an antiseptic smell of the place we are in. Nothing that would make her—her.

I inhale her neck again—trying to pinpoint a trace of a smell that makes me think I would recognize her anyway, but I must be mad because there’s nothing there.

She’s lying lifeless, and my heart hurts so fucking much I can’t stand it.

So, I close my eyes and try to remember…

The first time she told me with a sleepy, sexy voice ‘I’m yours’ in the middle of the night with her butt pressed to my cock. It was even before the mark I gave her. I’m pretty sure she didn’t realize she had said that. She went back to sleep immediately after.

“You never gave me your mark, Little Wolf. You have to wake up. You have to wake up for me, Ash,” I say quietly just for her, but I know the guys can hear it too. They are werewolves, after all, sitting in the same room.

But I don’t care.

I don’t care about anything anymore. Just her.

I open my eyes again and look at my Gamma and Beta, both looking dirty and hunted.

“What happened to her?” I ask because I need to know who to kill, even if it’s one of them. “Why was she there in the middle of the fucking fight?”

“She used to be a General,” Gamma reminds me, “She’s not— ”

“Tell me what the hell happened,” I growl.

“When we came back, I commanded her to stay in your bedroom, but she didn’t listen,” Beta starts to talk, looking at her tiny hands in his again, “She came to the camp and screamed at all of us, demanding respect and loyalty to her.”

“Because we were all a bunch of incompetent assholes,” Gamma chips in.

“When you stupidly got yourself kidnapped, no offense your Highness, all of the officers were fighting—not exactly knowing what to do or who to listen to.”

“Why is that?” I try to control my raging emotions.

“Beta was away, and I was there but you know full well half of them are Alpha-blooded, and I couldn’t get into their thick skulls when they started to argue and piss on every tree,” Beta-blooded Gamma answers with his head low.

“That’s when I came back and told Luna to stay in her room. I tried to outrank them all, despite my own fight with Gamma over the best course of action, but all this alpha blood started to boil and—”

“Well, Luna showed us who the true General there was pretty quickly,” Gamma laughs at the memory. “She was so furious that we were wasting our time on the fight. She single-handedly ended it with your sword. Literally. We lost some limbs, mostly fingers. You should have seen her then. Even Beta was getting hard…”

“She united everyone and found you in no time.” Beta’s turn to talk. “But then they kept a good defense, and because, as it turned out, you used the Unwanted boy to go in, we needed someone else to walk into their territory to send you your sword back…” Beta looks at me disapprovingly.

The only other message I left them was to get that blade back to me no matter what . The irony is not lost on me. I clear my throat. “So, you let her go?”

“We didn’t! I mean, we all thought she was the only one that didn’t look like your typical warrior,” Beta explains quickly and Gamma nods at his words, “Especially wearing a dress. And she had the best chances to do that and additionally keep them distracted long enough for us to break their flanks. It was the first time we all agreed on anything, but we knew we couldn’t risk our Luna, so we started arguing—Hm. Now when I think about it, she started that fight on purpose so she could slip away.”

“Oh, she totally did, didn’t she?” Atlas adds with a bitter laugh, and they exchange understanding eyes.

“I don’t know what happened there, but she succeeded. They took your sword inside their city as you wanted, and with that distraction she provided, we were finally able to penetrate their defenses enough to come to help you—”

“I was okay on my own. I just needed the sword, after all that wolfsbane, to get back.”

“Yeah, because she gave you that chance, Alpha. They were… feral. She made them turn their eyes from you. That was her plan from the beginning. She was so sure you just needed a little distraction.”

I swallow hard.

“What happened next?” I ask with a lump in my throat and close my eyes, bracing myself for the worst part.

“No. It happened there. I think. I was the one who found her, and she was all bruised up and… bleeding between her legs.”

There is silence in the room after that until one of them clears his throat, and I hear Beta speaking again.

“At first, I thought she just got her period because I could smell she wasn’t raped. At least, I thought so. I asked anyway, just in case, and that’s when she admitted she lost a pup. Um… I’m sorry, Alpha. If I knew she was pregnant—”

I shake my head.

“I didn’t know either,” I admit, pulling her limp, coldish body even closer to me.

“That’s when Beta told everyone what happened, and they united again.”

Beta nods at Gamma’s words .

“I asked her what she needed but she told me she wanted to fight. There was no room for opposition in the murderous look she gave me, so I stayed by her side—killing together one by one in our wolf forms. She was fearless and strong, and I didn’t know… I had no fucking idea she…”

He looks so distressed.

I thought they didn’t like each other, but he was the one to comfort her when I was gone. And even now.

Does he feel guilty for what happened to her? He should.

But I feel more guilty.

Atlas shakes his head and leaves like he can’t take looking at her like this anymore.

I don’t blame him.

I move my arm from under me, up to under her head. I bend it to wrap it around her forehead and lace my fingers in her strawberry-blond hair.

I don’t know how much time passes as we lay like this—with Beta's head resting on Asher’s stomach—but nothing changes. Even the temperature of her body doesn’t seem to go up.

“Was she conscious in the meantime?” I ask, not sure if Beta is conscious himself.

“No. But the nurse cleaned her if that’s why you ask, Alpha.”

It’s not, but whatever.

Atlas opens the remains of the doors with his foot while holding two plates of avocado toast in his hands. “I told the guy not to bring the reports after all, but if you are wrong, Alpha…”

Thank God, I am starving. I reach for the plate and my hand freezes mid-air. It’s buttered multigrain toast. Why did I think …

“What?” Atlas notices my face. “If you want something fancy, no offense, but you will need to… um… mind-link the cook? Shit. I know you are stuck here, for now, I’ll go prepare something—”

“No, it’s fine.” I take a bite over Asher’s shoulder.

The doctor comes back in with a clipboard and a grave face. I let him check on all her vitals before jumping into questions.

“Is there anything more I should know, doctor?” I ask observing him carefully when I’m done with my bland toast.

“Mmm, no,” he’s lying.

And he is so bad at it it’s disrespectful to all the Rogues.

“Tell me,” I command.

“With the state of her uterus right now… she won't be able to conceive again. But she’s an alpha wolf,” he adds quickly, “She might still heal.”

He gives me a look. A with-a-true-mate’s-help look.

And I can see he doesn’t believe it is me. All of them don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if Atlas commanded Officers to look for her true mate behind my back.

Well, holding her cold, unconscious body makes me doubt it, too.

“I don’t care if we ever have any mini-wolves, as long as she lives, so you better make fucking sure she does. Keep checking everything.”

“Alpha… I’m not gonna lie. Her wolf is practically dormant at this point, but her body is used to having all this royal alpha power… You know what happened when she was too distracted to speed up healing her stab wound over a week ago.”

“Oh fuck!” Atlas exclaims with wide eyes. “ Did she forget to speed-heal or was she struggling with a wound that her true mate inflicted?” he asks, pointing his chin at me. “She was already marked by you, right?”

The doctor opens and closes his mouth several times before swearing profoundly, too.

“Just hold her tight and try to wake up her wolf,” he finally believes I could be her true mate. “I’ll keep coming to check on her, but the truth stands. She’s basically human at this point and we are not equipped for that. But humans are not equipped for her either, so if…” he doesn’t finish the last sentence.

He doesn’t have to. If I won’t help her start healing, she’ll die.

“So… you are true mates,” Atlas says looking at my wife’s unconscious face, while Beta goes back to resting his head on her body.

“I am, aren’t I? I can’t believe I was so jealous of… myself.” I chuckle sourly at the memories.

“How did you figure it out?” Beta asks, lifting his head up.

I notice he intertwined his fingers with hers, and I nod at it. “Last time I checked, you thought she was an entitled little bitch.”

I see his smile.

“Oh, she is,” he says with a grin. “And thank Gods for that. You would be dead otherwise.”

I nod. He is my Beta, of course, in his eyes he’s now devoted to the one who saved my life.

I take a deep breath before coming to terms with the one thing I really wanted to ignore. “I started thinking she was lying about her true mate when she took me to her family for Greg’s birthday.”

“Did she lie though?” Atlas asks. “I mean… you are an Alpha she technically met when she already knew you’d get married. Oooh, she’s sleek.”

“But what happened that you started questioning that?” Beta doesn’t give up.

I guess we all need some distraction.

“I was fucking her on that balcony, and she accidentally mind-linked me to some of her thoughts.”

Beta already knows part of it.

“Excuse me, she let you fuck her on the balcony for everyone to see?” Atlas laughs in disbelief .

“Um, yeah, all of her family was on the other side of the glass doors and flimsy curtains. She even asked if I want her to turn so, I could fuck her from behind on the railing.”

Atlas chuckles with a belly laugh. “When I met her, I thought she would cut off your balls before letting you fuck her, and you are telling me you got her wrapped around your dick in a week? If that’s not proving you are true mates, then I don’t know what is.”

“Honestly, sometimes I feel like she just uses me for sex. I mean, she hates me, but she likes the sex—”

“God, unless you want to talk about two guys fucking, stop with the sex talk,” Beta growls. “But it would make sense with the mind-linking thing.”

“She later made me think that it was just, you know… us being royal alphas and getting to know each other better… I don’t know. I never fucked any other royal Alpha.”

Beta nods because I told him she could do that after a while, and that’s what he thought then, too.

“You know what would also make sense?” Atlas chips in. “How she never argued about anything, even when you made her sit with your personal whore you used to fuck at the very same table. She befriended her instead. She never even questioned why we have so many whores in the packhouse.”

Beta shakes his head.

“I think it was just a survival instinct, maybe she was just—”

“No, trust me, she may not be okay with that, but I spent enough free time with her to know if she wanted to question anything, she would find a way to let us know. She wasn’t jealous because she knew she was the one.”

He has a point there…

“She never even asked about another bedroom… and I mean never. Not even one ‘why do I have to sleep with you’ or ‘I’d rather sleep on the floor’, nothing. I stopped asking to take care of her Luna room after a week,” I say while caressing her body with my hand under the cover .

“I was there the other day, such a waste. All the things we brought for her, under a layer of dust, she never even saw it… but how does it prove she could be your mate?” Beta is skeptical as always.

Atlas answers.

“You know that Alpha would lose his mind if she had a problematic nature and couldn’t, you know, adapt without whining.”

Beta makes a funny face as if he wants to argue about the whining.

“Oh, give her a break. She’s only twenty,” I roll my eyes.

“But what about that mind-linking thing, Alpha? I mean, we talked about it before, and it wasn’t enough for me to jump to that conclusion.”

“Well, to be honest, that was the first thing I jumped into. But maybe because I already noticed her mother kept looking at us like she knew or maybe was suspecting something… Anyway, Asher kept getting all these comments as if getting along with me was nothing weird, and… I mean, we were literal enemies just a few weeks before this arranged marriage thing, right? So, it was weird. We met with this seer after I bit her, and it wasn’t healing…” We all exchange knowing looks, now finally aware I’m part Lycan with extra venom in my teeth, “And that seer straight away asked if we are mates because it would apparently make sense for Asher’s character.”

“And she does make sense for your character,” Atlas comments. “Let’s be honest here. If she was any different, magic scroll or not, you would kill her on the spot with the first shot at defiance.”

He has a point: I am not the most patient man with the people I am surrounded by.

So, we are… mates, I think, looking at her.

“Is that why I had the need to mark her? Because she’s my mate?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Atlas says. He was in my shoes once. Claudia felt everything, and he, completely nothing.

“Oh, you wanted to? I thought it was just a business decision because of the scroll,” Beta asks with furrowed brows .

W hile he makes his promised male princess foe

Blessed when his hidden part is the strongest

We figured out it meant full moon when Asher unknowingly revealed I have extra Lycan powers. I wasn’t aware that was not normal, but I didn’t think about that scroll at all.

“I know you fell for her but to the point of marking?” Beta continues.

He plans to forever ignore his true mate, whom he can feel. Good luck with that.

“To be honest, it wasn’t a decision at all. I took her for that date, you know, at my new house, and we had sex on the back patio,” I try not to laugh at Beta’s exasperated reaction at talking about straight sex again. “It was not the first time I thought about it, but she was coming undone under me—moonbeam illuminating her fair skin, she looked fucking beautiful and sexy, and I couldn’t even think straight. Next thing I know, I’m drinking her blood, coming inside of her, and she starts crying like I ruined her life…”

“That’s when she got pregnant?” one of them asks.

My brain registered the question, but I’m too far gone in my thoughts to answer anything. The only way my marking ruined Asher’s life is the fact it bonded us for life without the possibility of rejection , but we were already married, so it shouldn’t have mattered unless…

“Oh, she wanted to reject me as a true mate, didn’t she? That’s why she needed that book. And it must have been on that date. It was a full moon.”

“But why?” Beta asks.

Atlas starts to open his mouth, but I’m quicker.

“Because she knows I planned to kill my true mate as soon as I met her. And that’s why she was lying about it.”

It all makes sense now.

“Fuck. I am her true mate.”

We all wait in silence until the Doctor comes in again and starts checking on all her wounds—working around me. They look horrible. I can’t even think about the state of her insides right now.

“She always had such a force of life no matter what. I can’t believe how she lies still like this now… I can’t.” Atlas leaves again, not being able to take it anymore.

“I don’t get why she even likes to spend time with him. He’s the biggest dick I know,” Beta comments.

“It’s not like she has any alternatives here.”

And if she would mind spending time with assholes, she wouldn’t be mated to me.

The doctor calls a female nurse, and I go to pee while she cleans Ash again. When I’m back, she finishes putting on new mesh panties with a pad on her and sends me a painful smile.

“Thank you, Jill, you may go.”

“I still need to clean her back wounds.”

“I’ll take it from here.”

Beta stands up to help me, and we do it in silence.

“Do you still plan to kill her?” he asks finally, with a tone of voice suggesting he doesn’t want to clean her in vain if I want to end her life anyway.

But I know better. Somehow, he started to care for her. For our Luna.

“No, I don’t.”

I throw out all the bloody gauze to the bin and lay down with Ash, embracing her in our favorite position.

“You know she won’t believe you, right, Alpha?” he asks, taking her limp hand in his again. “She’ll probably try to escape. Atlas is right, she might love her life more than you.”

“He didn’t say it like that. ”

Beta lifts his eyebrows at me as if he knows better.

“Well, we won’t tell her that I know. I’ll use the alpha command on all of you, just in case.”

“You’ll keep it a secret forever?” he asks skeptically.

“She wanted to,” I point out. “But no. Just long enough to earn her trust and enough years to back that trust up.”

He sizes me up for a long time and then finally speaks.

“Yes, Alpha, as you wish.” He already treats it seriously. That’s why he’s my second in command.

I tell him to take a nap after he refuses to leave her side, and mind-link Gamma and Delta to make sure they are good with taking care of the rest of the pack, even though I know I can’t trust the second one.

But I can’t expose him yet, either.

As soon as Beta doses off and everything is taken care of, I just lie with Ash—pull her, hug her, kiss her mark, and caress her whole body, sometimes stopping at her flat stomach, trying to wrap my mind around that tiny being’s life that ended before I could even comprehend its existence.

Thinking maybe it just wasn’t meant to be is the cruelest and most painful thought I’ve ever had.

I know we barely know each other and it was all arranged, and I don’t feel the mate bond… yet… but… I already imagined spending the rest of my life with you—please don’t take that dream away from me.

I try to mind-link her but it’s like there’s no wolf left in her at all. But there must be, there must be…

I’m woken up by the most delicious smell of my favorite avocado, but my face falls when I see the same hot buttered toast again.

“What the fuck man? I mean, Alpha.” Atlas tries to hide his irritation and Beta snickers at him. “You know I can’t cook, and Greyson is out in the market right now. What snack did you expect?”

“Avocado,” I say with a sour face but snatch the plate anyway, lifting myself a little bit to a more sitting position, but still touching Ash’s body skin-to-skin as much as I can.

I start munching on the plain toast because I am hungry all the time, and he is right, I shouldn’t expect anything else from him, he’s not a foodie like Beta…

“Wait, why aren’t you eating… and staring at me?” I furrow my brows at both of them.

“Do you smell avocado, Alpha?” Beta carefully asks, and I don’t get why.

“Do you smell it too? I thought I was going crazy…”

They exchange a look, “Do you think it might be… I don’t know… Asher, maybe?” Atlas asks.

Oh, fuck!

I push the plate back at Atlas and lean down, wrapping my arms around Asher. I bury my nose in her neck inhaling her scent. Green forest, fresh spring air, water with traces of blood, and there it is… that thing I couldn’t pinpoint earlier. The subtle and pleasant fragrance of slightly sweet and nutty, freshly cut avocado fruit. “Mmmm.”

“I’ll take that moan as a yes,” Atlas chuckles, and I give him a death stare.

I ignore those two fuckers and take another whiff—because I can’t quite believe I really can smell it. Now when I think about it… I subconsciously must have picked up on this smell for weeks. I can smell it! And I can feel it too. All these emotions enhanced—and at the same time—nothing truly changes but everything feels so different.

“I can’t believe I can fucking feel my true mate, and it’s her !” I whisper-shout at them and they both shake their heads in amusement.

I will have to make that alpha command extra air tight, if I don’t want them to make fun of me for accidentally falling in love with my true mate and biggest enemy.

True mate !

I feel the true mate bond, I repeat to myself over and over so it will sink in. I have a true mate, and it’s a girl I’m in love with anyway. My true and only weakness…

I can feel her .

And I know what I have to do now.