ALPHA CORVIN

Freya came first. My fated mate came first. Before anyone or anything.

I had tried to juggle this truth for three years when I first met her. He put everyone first but that caused more pain.

If only I had chosen her form the starting and damned all the consequences.

She studied me for a long moment.

"Why am I here, Corvin." She said it quietly this time, all the heat gone out of it, only the question left. "You’re getting mated today. So why am I here."

"Because Victor is alive."

Her face shifted. The shock was there, but underneath it sat something that was not surprise, like a thing she had carried and never spoken.

"If he finds out you’re alive too," I went on, "he’ll kill you. I needed you somewhere I could protect you." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"I knew there was a chance he survived." She tightened her arms around herself. "When Ryker threw him off that hill. I never let myself believe he was gone."

"The witches will have felt your energy during the full moon. The same way I did." I kept my tone even. "He’ll know soon. He has people everywhere."

"Here, presumably." She lifted an eyebrow.

"Victor won’t walk into my pack to kill you. He isn’t stupid."

"I know that." She went quiet, then leveled that clear look at me, the one I had always hated and always needed. "So I’m only here for my safety. That’s all."

I said nothing.

She had always been able to do this. Read me past whatever I put on the surface. I could go cold, I could go flat, I could give a room nothing for hours, and Freya would look straight through to the thing I was sitting on and name it without blinking. She was the only person alive who could put my own lie in front of me and make me feel the weight of it.

"You’re here," I admitted, "because I couldn’t stop myself from seeing you."

I was at the bars now. I found her hands where they gripped the iron and closed mine over them. She did not pull away, not yet, and I could smell her, the whole of her, and I breathed her in.

"I needed to see you," I murmured, my hands holding hers against the cold metal. "I needed to hold you."

She let me, for a moment.

Then, "What about Amaris."

I went still.

"That’s her name, isn’t it." Her hands went rigid under mine. "Your mate. Amaris."

"She knows our mating is for an heir." I kept my hands where they were. "That’s all it is. She understands that."

She drew her hands out from under mine and stepped back from the bars.

"It is never that simple, Corvin."

"I never said it was simple." My hands stayed on the iron, empty now. "I said we aren’t connected. The blood didn’t bond. She knows it’s only the heir."

"You should leave." She folded her arms over herself again. "Your mate is waiting for you."

"Don’t be like this, Freya." I pressed closer to the bars.

"Like what." Her eyes came up, the wet dried into something harder now. "You want to drag me straight back into the cycle. I can see it on you. I won’t let you do it again."

"That isn’t—"

"Your sons don’t know I’m here. Your mate is upstairs being prepared to be called your Luna. And me—" She shook her head slowly. "I’ll be exactly what I was before. The woman who fucks the Alpha behind a locked door while everyone pretends not to know. I won’t. I would rather take my chances with Victor than do that again."

I looked at her standing there with her arms around herself and her scars catching the low light, and I knew she was right. I knew it the way I knew most things she said to me were right, which was completely and against my own preference.

"I’ll sort everything out," I said. "I promise you. I’ll fix all of it."

Something in her face closed over.

"Your promises are worthless to me." The words came out flat and exact.

She lifted one arm, turned it so the scars caught the light, and let it fall back to her side.

"You once promised to protect me. I’m the one with the proof of how that went. So until you start showing me actions instead of promises, until you start treating me like your fated mate instead of a secret you keep in a cell—" Her jaw set. "You can get the fuck out."

She turned her back to me.

I stood there with my hands on the iron and the cold of it under my palms and the whole length of her turned away from me, and for the first time in longer than I could measure I did not have a single move left to make.

I let go of the bars.

I took in her back, the line of her shoulders, the woman I had buried and grieved and never once stopped wanting, and I understood that I had brought her here to save her and managed only to remind her of every way I had already failed her.

I straightened my jacket.

"Freya."

She did not turn around.

I waited a moment longer, in case she would. She did not. Her shoulders stayed squared and her back stayed to me and she had said everything she intended to say.

I turned and walked back up the corridor, and with every step the cold of the lower level fell away behind me and the noise of the pack came up to meet me, the grounds, the ceremony, the woman in the ivory dress waiting upstairs to be made my Luna for the sake of an heir and nothing else.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

I stood there in the dark with my hand on the rail and breathed out slowly and put Freya back behind the door inside me where I had kept her for a year, because that was the only way I knew how to walk back into the rest of my life.

Then I climbed the stairs to go and get mated.