CAPTIVE

Present dayAidan touched his right bicep above his designer shirt, as he looked out over New York City from his office on the 94th floor of One World Trade Center. It was a few days before his “mark” showed up, and that always made him extremely irritable. He didn't want to be disturbed, but the knocking on the door was evidence that he rarely got what he wanted.“Sir, your wife is here,” his secretary announced, poking her head through the half-open door.“Send her in, please.”Aidan took a deep breath and turned to meet Myra's gentle, smiling, soft face.“Do you need anything?” he asked her dryly, and regretted it a few seconds later when he saw her pout. Myra was a very good wife: a quiet, obedient and willing Omega; and as if that wasn't enough, she was General Nader's daughter, so he had excellent ties of loyalty to her family. But after ten years, her submission was driving Aidan out of his mind. “Forgive me. How can I help you?”Myra seemed to think long and hard before she da

“I was right!” Aidan hissed angrily as he helped his beta into the passenger seat. “It was too easy to quell the riots, because they were just a distraction.”“So the real target was the Watchtower?” Brennan muttered.“Exactly!” Aidan turned the van around and took the road south toward Wales.They would have gotten there a lot faster if they had moved like wolves, but Brennan was in no shape to transform with that injured leg, he had to give it at least a couple of hours to heal.“I don't understand. The Watchtower is supposed to be impregnable,” said his Beta. “How did they get in?”“I have no idea.” And it was the honest truth, Aidan didn't even know it.The Watchtower was a fortress of ancient magic, said to have been the royal palace of Isrion's lineage, and precisely for that reason, in over six hundred and fifty years, Aidan had refused to lay a claw there, but now he felt it calling to him. It was a strange attraction, as if they were two pieces of a magnet seeking each other

Everything about that woman had become white and small, doll-like. The hands, the tiny fingernails, even the eyelashes. Her skin looked like polished porcelain and Aidan could almost swear he could see her glow, with that special opaque light the moon had. Or maybe it was simply because she was his.“You are my Moon...” he murmured caressing her face, and suddenly the man, the heir to the throne, the Alpha protector of Casthiel's lineage emerged in him.She looked helpless and innocent, but that was the operative word: “looked”. If she really had been, her father would have never locked her in that cell in the Watchtower. It was a disgrace that after so many centuries of solitude, the Alpha's destined mate was precisely an enemy of his crown.And yet he needed and desired her, his whole spirit insisted on claiming her, on possessing her. It was rightly said that the bond between two mates was the most powerful bond among the lycans, and now Aidan was experiencing it firsthand, because

Aidan recoiled, shocked by the depth of rage in that girl's voice, though his own was not any less. He had waited centuries for his mate, and now she would not accept his claim on her, and that was exactly like...“Are you rejecting me?” he growled.“I'm telling you I won't let you mark me until I've met your wolf,” Rhiannon replied. After all, she the last lycan in her bloodline, and regardless of how much Aidan was her destined mate, she wasn't willing to bond with a wolf she didn't know.“There's just nothing else to it!” roared the Alpha. “This is me, this is my wolf...!”Rhiannon's gaze softened, unable to believe for a moment what she was hearing. Of course there was more, much more, otherwise he would never have been able to make use of those abilities.“Every lycan has his wolf. Where do you think the powers you use come from?!” bellowed Rhiannon. “They're not yours, you just use them! They belong to your wolf!”The Alpha's eyes darkened in a second.“I don't know what you're

King Caerbhall was not a man who particularly believed in the wiles of common sorceresses, but he was not so stupid as to deny that he lived in a world where real powers could change the lives of lycans; after all, his wife was living proof of that.As a priestess of the ancient religion, Erea had found a way to change the ties that bound humans to their wolves; a way to subdue the animal spirit and bind it indissolubly to man... but not even Erea had managed to break the curse on her son.“What do you mean ‘he will not be able to conceive’?” the queen asked raising her voice. “Finoa, I came here because the most important lycans of my court recommended you... you shame them all!”“I sincerely apologize, Your Majesty, but there is nothing I can do,” the woman replied regretfully. “A curse too powerful weighs on the prince, and I fear that my skills are not enough to remove it. But it is also true that they came to me too late, the mating period is almost over... perhaps if they come w