Promised to the Wrong Alpha
Louisa Forge didn’t choose this.
She was handed over like a bargaining chip — marked by an Alpha she despises, installed in a pack house that doesn’t want her, bound to a man who locks her in her room and calls it mercy. Kaelen is everything a wolf shouldn’t be: cruel, reckless, and hungry for a power he hasn’t earned.
But the pack house has another occupant.
Julian — former Alpha, widower, a man who has been quietly starving himself to death since the loss of his mate — is supposed to be irrelevant. A ghost in the east wing. Instead he’s the one who checks on her in the night, who brings her sedatives for the pain, who laughs with her over terrible soup until the whole dining room forgets to be miserable.
He’s also the one who tells her, very clearly, that what happened between them during her heat meant nothing.
He’s lying. They both know it.
Caught between a mate bond she never consented to and a connection she can’t name, Louisa is doing what she does best — surviving. She’s building alliances in quiet corners, winning loyalty one small kindness at a time, and carrying a secret that could burn everything to the ground.
Because the heir Kaelen is so desperate to claim?
It isn’t his.
Lire
Chapter: Chapter Five: The Gilded CageLouisaI’d only had a few days to digest the fact that my father had traded me off in an arranged mating. The betrayal festered in my mind, raw and bitter. I vacillated between rage and disappointment — between wanting to scream at him and wanting to bury him in a cold, permanent silence.I declined his offer to escort me on the short drive to my new home. I refused to stand like a helpless girl while he handed me over to a stranger. So, I wheeled my own suitcases, my boots thumping down the front steps of my childhood home while my father stood on the porch like a statue carved from guilt.I chucked my bags into the back of the SUV and slammed the door with every ounce of strength I possessed. The vehicle creaked in protest; the poor driver behind the wheel winced. I jumped into the passenger seat, buckled in, and immediately toed off my shoes, propping my feet on the dash like a rebel about to face execution.Every swear word known to man and wolf ran through my head in a steady cha
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Four: Ghosts in the GardenJulianTraditionally, a retired Alpha automatically became a member of the Elder Council. I truly didn’t have the energy to be a contributing member, but the old, familiar pull of duty had me dragging my aching body to the conference room whenever Kaelen demanded a meeting.It wasn’t as if he wanted counsel; he was too full of his own ideas to listen to the wisdom of “old people.” No, he simply wanted an audience whenever he made another sweeping change.I dropped into a leather chair—not at the head of the table, but along the side. The leather groaned beneath me. I resisted the urge to fold my arms and lay my head down. I was nothing more than a bag of bones now, more ghost than man. I hardly had the energy to get out of bed, let alone sit through another of Kaelen’s self-congratulatory monologues.The other members wore expressions of mixed exasperation and concern, shifting uneasily as Kaelen entered. For reasons known only to him, he had taken to wearing army fatigues every day.
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Three: The Blood of the HeirKaelen“I hate this tie. Bring me the other one.”Mandi scurried around the bed to fetch the alternative I’d laid out—the gold silk with midnight-blue stripes. She held it out with her eyes downcast, a trembling little bird. I snatched the tie from her hands and wrapped it around my neck, tucking it beneath my collar and knotting it with deliberate precision as I watched my reflection.She didn’t seem to grasp the significance of the occasion. I needed to look the part.I was about to be named Alpha.I smiled at my reflection and smoothed a hand over my short-cropped hair. The white-blond stubble was baby-soft; it would curl like a halo if I ever abandoned my crew cut.Alpha Kaelen.The title sent a thrill through me. I’d once thought I would have to kill the old man to claim it. But after my mother died, I realized I wouldn’t need to. All I had to do was wait while he drowned in his grief, his strength bleeding out one day at a time. I simply stood by and watched him rot. His weaknes
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Two: The Dying EmbersJulian It had been months—almost a year—but it never got any easier. The void where my soul used to be felt like an enormous ulcer, gnawing away at my insides day in and day out. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on anything. Every thought, every breath, circled back to Annie. In my grief, I replayed the moment the light faded from her beautiful baby-blue eyes, over and over, as if I could somehow change the ending by reliving it. Werewolves weren’t supposed to get sick. We healed quickly, our bodies resilient against human frailty. But she did get sick—slowly, painfully—and no amount of prayer or pack medicine could stop it. My mate had left me to die of a broken heart. I had nothing left to live for, and I was fading. I was barely a shadow of the Alpha I once was. My body had withered until my skin clung too tightly to my bones, my reflection a stranger with hollow cheeks and eyes sunken into grief. My hair was shaggy, my beard brushing my chest, yet I couldn’t must
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter One: The TradeElaraI followed the sound of raised voices down the hall to my father’s office. Peeking around the door frame, I saw my sister and my father, practically nose to nose as they argued.Louisa was the only person I knew who had the nerve to stand up to him. She was tall for a woman, but Father still towered over her by several inches. The gray streaks threading through his dark hair did nothing to lessen the aura of Alpha power that radiated from him. Even the lines at the corners of his eyes seemed to deepen with authority. The way he glowered down at her, nostrils flared and eyes blazing, made me want to shrink back into the shadows.Louisa never cowered. She glared right back at him, her hands planted on her hips, her chin lifted in defiance, shoulders squared like she was carved from stone.She was every bit an Alpha as Father was. As the firstborn, she should have been next in line, but the Council would never allow a female to take the title. They were all stuck in some patriarcha
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Eight: A Different StoryJarethThe drop point was a hollow in the base of a split oak half a mile north of the cottage, on the edge of Broken Arrow territory where the tree line thinned and the ground rose toward the mountains. I had used it twice before—once to send a report out, once to receive a supply package that Malachi had retrieved before Sarah was awake. This time I went myself.The package was there. Small, wrapped in oilcloth, wedged into the hollow with the particular neatness that was Brennan’s signature. I checked the seal before I opened it. The seal was intact.I tucked it inside my jacket and walked back.The cottage felt different when I came through the door. It took me a moment to identify why. Sarah was at the tavern, Kevin was with her, and Malachi was watching them both. The cottage was simply empty. I had lived alone my whole life and had never once noticed the quality of an empty room. I noticed it now. The kitchen still smelled of the breakfast she had made—eggs and fried potato and
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Seven: The LetterSarahJareth had been up before me, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that he was already deep in quiet conversation with Malachi at the kitchen table when I came out, a map spread between them that they folded away with practiced casualness the moment I appeared.I made coffee for everyone without being asked, because it was something to do with my hands while I absorbed the fact that Malachi seemed to be a new fixture in our house.Kevin appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, hair disordered from sleep, and climbed into his chair with the focused purposefulness of a child who had learned that breakfast didn’t make itself. I scrambled eggs and fried the leftover potato from last night and cut bread and set it all on the table and the four of us ate together in the particular comfortable quiet that had become the shape of mornings in the cottage.After breakfast Jareth and Malachi took their coffee outside. I washed the dishes and swept the kitchen floor and went to che
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Six: Under the DoorPoppyI found it on my way to bed.Most nights I was the last one up — had been for forty years, ever since Frank’s heart gave out and left me with a tavern to run and no particular reason to hurry to an empty bed. I did my rounds after closing. Checked the locks, banked the fire, wiped down the bar one last time because there was comfort in the ritual of it even when there was no practical need. Frank used to say I cleaned when I was thinking. He wasn’t wrong. He was right about most things, which had been equal parts wonderful and aggravating for thirty-seven years.The letter was on the floor just inside the back door. A plain envelope, no name on the outside, tucked against the threshold as though it had been slid carefully underneath rather than dropped. I almost missed it in the dim — my eyes weren’t what they were, another thing Frank wasn’t around to be right about — but I caught the pale rectangle of it against the dark floorboards and bent to pick it up.I stood for a moment
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Five: Worth Burning the World ForJasper I hadn’t shifted in eleven days. Not for lack of trying. Every morning I went to the tree line at the eastern edge of the pack house grounds, stripped off my shirt in the early heat, and stood in the shadow of the pines waiting for my wolf to come. Every morning he refused. Not with the clean resistance of a wolf choosing stillness — with the jagged, painful half-refusal of something broken, a mechanism that wanted to function and couldn’t find the way. On the third day I had managed a partial shift that left me on my knees in the dirt for twenty minutes afterward, my hands wrong, my spine screaming, my wolf retreating back behind whatever wall he’d built and refusing to come out again. On the seventh day I hadn’t tried. I’d just stood there in the trees and listened to him howl. Not out loud. The howling was internal, which was somehow worse — a sound that filled my skull and had nowhere to go, that Scarlet could apparently sense in the small hours, lying beside me, becau
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Four: A NameSarah I woke at three in the morning with the absolute certainty that someone had just been in the room with me. I lay still, every sense reaching into the darkness. The cottage was quiet. Through the wall I could hear Kevin’s breathing — slow and even, the particular rhythm of a child deeply asleep. Outside, the insects had settled into their late-night register, low and constant and unalarmed. Nothing had moved. Nothing was wrong. And yet. The feeling wasn’t fear. I knew fear — it had been my first language for years, the electric spike that preceded bad things. This was something else. Something that felt less like an intrusion and more like a presence. Like someone had sat beside my bed for a while and then quietly, gently left. I pressed my fingertips to my sternum. The place where my power lived felt warm. Not the hot surge of lightning — just warm. The warmth of a recently inhabited space. There had been a smell. I was certain of it, pulling the memory up through the layer
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Forty-Three: A Blood LineFelicia The door swung shut behind him and didn’t latch. It never latched. He had never fixed it and I had long ago stopped believing it was an oversight. I waited until the sound of his footsteps on the path had faded completely — past the blackthorn hedge, down the bank, across the creek. I knew the rhythm of his leaving the way I knew the rhythm of everything in this cottage. The particular creak of the third porch step. The way the blackthorn rustled when a shoulder brushed it. The silence that settled back into the pines when he was finally, completely gone. Only then did I look at the hairbrush. It sat in the center of my worktable where I had placed it — away from his herbs, away from the materials I had been preparing for the spell he wanted. Away from everything that was his. It looked ordinary in the thin window light. A woman’s hairbrush, plain handle, a few dark strands still caught in the bristles. I reached out and picked it up. The moment my fingers closed around
Dernière mise à jour: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Seven: I Need YouGabriel scooped her up and carried Honorera to the bed. He laid her down as if she was as fragile as glass. Then he knelt on the bed next to her and continued the kiss where he had left off, fully unleashing his passion. His hands pulled up her shirt so he could touch her bare, heated skin. She moaned and writhed underneath his touch, wanting more, needing more. Her hands tugged impatiently at his t-shirt, yanking it up until he obliged her and pulled it off over his head... before doing the same for her. Honorera was naked before him, in only her panties, since his over-size t-shirt was all she wore to bed most nights. He’d never seen anything more beautiful.He worshiped her body, kissing her neck, biting lightly at the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, before he turned his attention to her breasts. Her breasts were full, the dusky nipples pearled in the cool air. He kissed the soft flesh before drawing the nipple into his mouth, sucking lightly until she groaned a
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-03-17
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Six: Say it AgainGabriel climbed the stairs, his shoulders stiff and sore with tension. He'd been working for weeks, digging through all his contacts, trying to find anything he could on Honorera, her family, her past, and the price on her head. But he'd made almost no progress. He traced Tanner and Kayla Lee back to a small pack in Ohio. Kayla Lee had been an almost invisible member of the pack, an obedient omega. When her brother was exiled, she went with him. Possibly she was forced by her brother to accompany him into no man's land. But somewhere along the way, they had parted.Todd would not reveal the owner of the contract, and King’s denied all knowledge of the mark. "It's not one of mine, Rico. When are you coming back to work? We need you man, the boys are getting sloppy without you."When he reached the top of the bedroom, he was surprised to be met by his mother. She was wrapped in her favorite tattered terrycloth bathrobe, but she was no less intimidating as she propped her han
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-03-14
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Five: Happy Now?Something was wrong. Honorera didn't know what it was, but Gabriel was different. He had a dark and stormy expression, and he was distracted all the time. She couldn’t help but ask herself, had she done something wrong? Or perhaps he had simply grown tired of her? Whatever the reason, she felt the change deeply and keenly, and it scared her. Whatever small progress she had made at being more confident shriveled away, and she felt herself shrinking back into her old shell. Gabriel still woke her early to train, and he trained her hard. She hated the weights, but she loved the kickboxing lessons. She thought she was getting stronger, but Gabriel gave her so little feedback, she couldn't tell if he approved. After breakfast, he often disappeared without much explanation. "Sorry love, I have some work to do," he would say, and he would take his laptop and phone and retreat into the study and close the door behind himself. Or he would kiss her forehead and pass her off to his
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-02-25
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Four: Two TimingThe tour moved on. There was a big meeting hall that the pack used for public events, a small private school for the pack children, a brightly painted playground, and a small medical clinic. Honorera was impressed. The pack was like a town all to itself. "How many are there of you?""We have about 200 adults, plus their children," he answered, and she was surprised. She had imagined a group of about 20 or so."And they are all able to shift?""Most of them."She would never have guessed there were so many supernatural beings in the world, let alone in one small town. She tried to imagine that her own mother had been a wolf, but she couldn't picture it. She'd seen old, faded, and creased photos of her mother in Tanner's room. Rachel Talbot looked like a small, mousey woman. Honorera’s mother didn't look capable of swatting a mosquito, let alone changing into a mythical creature.It was past lunchtime when the couple wandered back to the main house, but Elena had left them some s
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-02-20
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Three: Damage ControlGabriel's father called him into the study. It was a classically masculine room, with dark paneling and shelves of antiquarian books that no one in living history had ever read. Gabriel sat in the chair across from the imposing desk and waited while his father seated himself, and steepled his hands in front of him. "Son, I know you've waited a long time to find this girl," he said carefully. Gabriel could only nod in agreement, while watching his father warily."I'm happy for you. There is no greater joy than finding your mate. But Gabe... you have to know, this girl is not fit to be your Luna."Gabriel stiffened, and his fingers tightened over the wooden arms of the chair. "What do you mean?""She is weak, in every way. physically, mentally, and emotionally... she is completely ignorant of our ways and our culture. She doesn't shift, she may not even have the inner wolf. How can such a broken girl be the caretaker of our pack?"Gabriel suppressed the urge to growl. Had it
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-02-20
Chapter: Chapter Twenty-Two: I Don't Want YouBefore she was quite ready to face Gabriel’s family, they had left the highway and driven deep into the hills. The forest closed around them, and the landscape became more and more rural until, at last, they pulled up in front of an ancient-looking brick house. It stood two stories and sprawled into two wings from the main building. Black shutters framed the windows, and Ivy was growing up the sides. Gabriel parked the truck and went around to help Honorera down from the passenger seat. Before her feet hit the ground, the front door of the house flew open, and people tumbled out. Honorera shivered in fear and hid behind Gabriel’s broad back. "Hello Mum," Gabriel held his arms out to his mother, but Elena simply brushed him aside. "I don't want you right now. Where is she?" Gabriel pulled Honorera out from behind him. "Honorera, this is my mom. Elena Shepherd." "Oooh!" Elena clasped her plump hands in front of her breast, "Aren't you just adorable! Gabriel, she's preciou
Dernière mise à jour: 2023-02-07
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