The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride

It happened six days after the receipt of the letter.

Not at Ironveil. They were smart enough not to come at the estate directly.

It happened on the east road, two miles from the gate, at dusk, when Pip was returning from the village market with the weekly supply run.

He came back without the supplies but with a deep slash across his left forearm that had been wrapped, badly, with his own shirt but still bleeding profusely.

I was crossing the courtyard when he stumbled through the gate and looked like he was in a great deal of pain. I reached him first before anyone else did.

"Pip? What happened?!" I asked frustatedly.

His breathing was hard and fast.

"Three of them," he winced. His voice was steady but his face was the color of old paper. "Greyveil markings on their gear. They weren't after the supplies."He looked at me with his honest brown eyes.

"They asked where the Luna-designate slept. Which room. Which window faced east."

The cold that went through me was not fear for myself. It was rage. Pure rage.

They had attacked Pip. Seventeen-year-old Pip who fed stray cats in the stables and brought bread rolls to nobody girls out of basic human decency, who had no rank and no power and no reason to be a target except that he had been kind to me.

"Did you tell them?" I shot back.

"No, I would never" he replied. With a dignity I had not expected and immediately should have. "I told them I didn't know and then I ran but one landed a strike before I could move two steps"

I took his injured arm carefully and looked at the wound. It was clean through probably from a blade, not a claw, which meant shifted wolves hadn't been part of it.

A warning, then. Not yet an extraction

attempt.

"Come on," I said. "I'm getting Aldric to look at this."

"I'm fine"he said. "Argh, he screamed in pain as he tried to move"

"You're not fine and I'm not asking, now let's go" I insisted.

And something in my voice some quality I

hadn't fully owned before made him not argue. He simply complied.

I hung his arm round my neck and walked him inside to Aldric. He winced the entire way.

Caius had found out within the hour.

I was sitting with Pip in Aldric's lower room, Aldric's hands working over the wound with

the focused competence of a man with more skills than he advertised, when I felt Caius

approach before I heard him - the mark on my neck flared and I knew, two seconds

before the door opened, that he was on the other side of it.

He came in. Took in Pip, the wound, Aldric's hands, and me. His face did the thing it did

when he was containing something enormous - the controlled stillness, the particular quality of a man holding a structure together by will alone.

His eyes came to me.

"Three Greyveil scouts. East road." He said it not as a question.

"Yes," I said. "They wanted to know my room."

His expression changed. It looked like anger.

"Pip" Caius said.

The boy looked up, startled. I didn't think Caius had ever spoken to him directly before. "You're being moved into the main wing. Staff quarters, east side. Tonight."

Pip stared. Opened his mouth. Clearly he didn't want to.

"Don't argue with me just do as I say" Caius said. Not unkindly. Finally.

He turned his eyes and looked at me. I stood up.

"We need to talk. Now." he said.

I nodded and moved to him.

We walked to the study. He closed the door. For a moment he just stood there with his

back to me and I watched the curse markings on his neck pulse in the lamplight faster than usual. Agitated. Thinking about his next move.

Then he turned.

"Your room is being moved," he said.

"Tonight. North wing. The room beside the study."

I stared at him. "Why is that? I'll be fine" I said.

"Because I said so. That's your- " "Adjacent to mine," he said. "With a connecting door that locks from both sides. He stopped. Restarted with the precision of a man choosing each word carefully. "The east wing is exposed. Zoran's people know your window. But they will not know the north wing layout and they cannot reach that corridor without having to go through twelve wolves first."

It was logical. Practical. The most efficient solution to the immediate problem.

It was also his room.

"All right, that might work" I said.

He exhaled - not loudly, just a fractional release of something he'd been holding.

"The scouts," I said. "What happens to them?"

"Kael's handling it," he said.

"And Zoran, what are you going to do about him?" I asked.

The curse markings flared. His grinned his teeth as if he was refusing to let something out. When he looked at me this time there was something in his eyes that I had not seen before. Something past cold, past control, something that had not been given a name yet because it was still becoming.

"Zoran," he said, "made a mistake. He touched someone under my protection. That ends conversations and begins something else entirely."

"Under my protection." I thought of what that meant.

He meant Pip.

He also meant me. And the thing in his eyes that had not been named yet - I was starting to understand it.

Starting to be afraid of understanding it. Because if it was what I thought it was, it changed everything.

And I wasn't ready for everything to change. At least not yet.