The Stolen Mate of the Alpha Heir

Exile began with bare feet and a bleeding wound.

The guards left me at the eastern boundary with one water skin and no cloak. Rain turned the forest floor to mud. Each step pulled at my half-healed side, but I kept moving because the Nightfang sentries watched until the trees swallowed me.

My wolf would not stop calling for Rowan.

He had forgotten us. The thought scraped through my skull with every heartbeat. Yet I remembered the mark beneath his collar and the blankness in his eyes. Hatred would have hurt. That emptiness terrified me.

At dusk, three rogues found me.

They were too clean to be starving wanderers.

“The lady sends her sympathy,” the tallest said.

I ran.

Pain tore my side open. They hunted me for sport, herding me away from the road. One caught my hair and slammed me against a tree. Another raised a silver blade.

A one-booted madman dropped from the branches onto his back.

Garrick fought like madness given claws. He broke one assassin's wrist, bit through another's ear, and shifted halfway—hands becoming black talons while his body remained human. I seized the fallen silver knife and drove it into the third rogue's thigh.

“Who sent you?” I demanded.

He spat blood. “The future Luna.”

An arrow struck his throat before he could say more. A hidden fourth attacker fled through the trees.

Garrick watched the surviving rogues escape, then turned to me. His expression was no longer wild.

“I remember,” he said. “Lucian asked me to guard his child if anything happened to him.”

“Seraphine?”

“You.”

The world went silent except for rain.

Garrick led me into the mountains, to a cottage built inside the roots of an ancient ash tree. The witch who opened the door was tall, silver-haired, and visibly unimpressed.

“You vanished for twenty-three years,” she told Garrick.

“I was cursed. Ysabel, this is Lucian's daughter.”

The witch's anger disappeared.

Inside, Ysabel cut my palm and let three drops of blood fall into a bowl of moonwater. The water showed two infant girls, a woman exchanging blankets, and threads of magic weaving between their faces.

I gripped the table. “Helena.”

“Your scent, beauty, blood recognition, and portions of your fate were stolen in pieces,” Ysabel said. “Given to Helena's true daughter. The final theft was your mate bond. That required your awakening.”

“Can you reverse it?”

“Yes. Not safely. Not freely.”

Her price was a moonfire seed kept in a ruined shrine occupied by feral wolves. Garrick protested. Ysabel told him he had lost the right to object when he disappeared without explaining the curse that stole his mind.

Before sending me, Ysabel tested how deeply the theft ran. She placed mirrors around me and spoke my birth name. In one reflection I had silver eyes. In another, Helena's narrow face. In a third, I saw a pale-haired infant screaming while dark thread was sewn into her shadow.

“Helena could not create beauty or power,” Ysabel explained. “She redirected recognition. People saw in Seraphine what the spell taught them to expect, while they overlooked the same qualities in you. Every insult fed the curse. Every time you believed yourself lesser, the stolen shape settled more firmly.”

Shame rose in me. “So I helped her.”

“No.” Ysabel shattered the darkest mirror with her fist. “A child surviving abuse does not assist the abuser. Helena built a cage and punished you for learning its walls.”

Garrick turned away, shoulders shaking. He remembered finding Helena's ritual twenty years earlier. She had trapped him in wolf form, shattered his memory, and abandoned him beyond the border. His madness had not been weakness. It had been evidence.

Their bitterness filled the cottage, sharp enough to taste.

I accepted the bargain.

The shrine lay near Nightfang's northern patrol route. I entered alone at dawn, carrying wolfsbane smoke and a healer's satchel. Two ferals attacked before I reached the altar. I blinded one with powdered belladonna and cut the other across the muzzle, but a third pinned me beneath a fallen beam.

Cedar smoke and winter rain crashed over me.

Rowan tore the feral away.

He shifted mid-leap, a massive black wolf colliding with gray fur. Blood sprayed the stones. When he returned to human form, he stood naked and breathing hard, rain sliding over hard muscle and fresh claw marks.

My traitorous body recognized him even without the bond.

His gaze moved over me with open dislike—then caught on my torn shirt. Desire flashed so violently his nostrils flared.

He threw me his cloak. “Cover yourself.”

“You saved me.”

“Instinct.” He sounded angry about it.

I crawled toward the altar. The beam had crushed my ankle. Rowan cursed, lifted me without permission, and carried me inside the shrine.

The contact wrecked us both.

My cheek rested against his bare chest. His heartbeat hammered under my ear. One of his hands spanned my thigh, too close to the heat gathering between my legs. His scent deepened, and a low growl vibrated through him.

“You feel it,” I whispered.

“I feel nothing for you.”

His body contradicted every word.

At the altar, he set me down but did not release me. I turned my face up. His mouth was inches away. The old hunger returned between us, stripped of memory but not instinct.

“Tell me to stop,” I said.

He kissed me.

It was rough, furious, almost desperate. His hand tangled in my hair while mine slid over his shoulders. My wolf surged forward. Rowan lifted me onto the stone altar and stepped between my knees. When his mouth moved to my throat, my entire body shuddered.

“Elara.” He said my name like he had known it forever.

I pulled him closer.

Then the black mark beneath his collar flared.

Rowan jerked away with a strangled sound. His face emptied.

“You planned this.” Disgust replaced heat so quickly it made me sick. “You keep trying to poison me.”

“No. Rowan, look at the mark—”

He stumbled backward, fighting something I could not see. For one heartbeat, his gray eyes returned.

“Run,” he rasped.

Then he shifted and fled.

I found the moonfire seed beneath the altar, glowing like a captured star.

When I returned to Ysabel's cottage, my lips were swollen from Rowan's kiss and my heart was bleeding from his escape.

Ysabel took one look at me. “The curse controls his memories, not his body. That is why instinct keeps breaking through.”

I placed the moonfire seed in her palm. “Then tell me how to break it.”