Chapter 5: Mate

KAEL

Holt was still talking.

He had been talking for fourteen minutes. I knew because I had been counting. He stood on the raised platform in his formal pack coat and delivered the kind of speech built entirely out of words that meant nothing.

I was standing along the back wall because sitting felt like a commitment.

At some point during the third paragraph, I had closed my hand around the crystal stem of my glass. I became aware of this when the stem snapped. The broken edge opened my palm and blood ran down between my fingers and dripped onto the floor.

I couldn't feel it.

I looked at Holt's face. I thought about what it would take to end this right now — not the ceremony, but the particular irritation of this man's continued existence.

The math was clean. The timing was poor. Gary would point out the timing. Gary would be right, which was why I had a Gary.

Then Holt came toward me with four women behind him. He had come prepared. With a fawning tone, he told me they had high fertility rates and could give me an heir.

I looked at the women. Nothing. Just boredom.

"Get out," I said with a cold smile.

His grin froze on his face. The embarrassment beneath it was barely concealed.

Then it hit me again—that intoxicating scent. Her scent.

It flooded my veins. The killing rage I knew like my own heartbeat cracked open. Beneath it, something hotter. Nothing to do with blood.

I had never felt anything that wasn't violence. I didn't have a name for this.

My wolf did. He slammed against my ribs so hard my vision whited out for half a second.

My mate. She's in danger.

I was already moving east before the word finished forming.

---

LYRA

They had me in the side hall off the main ceremony room to be executed.

Four of Serena's guards. My wrists bound, my knees on stone. They had taken turns finding reasons to touch me on the way here — a shove that lasted too long, a grip that traveled somewhere it had no business going. One of them laughed when I flinched.

My son's crying was coming from somewhere nearby. Every time it peaked and then dropped, something in my chest dropped with it.

Serena walked to where I was kneeling. She looked down at me with the expression of someone examining a problem that had finally become convenient. Then she lifted her heel and brought it down on my right hand.

The crack was small. The pain was not.

Index and middle finger. I pressed my lips together and breathed through my nose and did not make a sound. My vision went white at the edges.

"You think you can seduce a beta into betraying the pack and call it loyalty?" Serena's voice rang out, loud enough for every guard in the room to hear. "An Omega whore playing at rebellion. I've received Darius's orders. You die today."

"You twist everything, You steal my son. You'll burn in hell for this," I spat.

Serena smiled. "Do it."

The guard's grip shifted on my arm. His forearm came across my throat.

I clawed at his arm and got nowhere. My vision went dark at the edges, then darker.

My son's crying was still coming from somewhere nearby. Faint now. Getting fainter.

A tear ran from the corner of my eye. Who would hold him like that if I died here?

The darkness came all the way up.

"Let her go."

The door opened. Kael walked in.

The guard's hand left my hair. His legs gave. He hit the floor face-down and didn't get back up.

It was very fast after that. The Alpha pressure Kael released didn't build — it simply existed, all at once, pressing down on every body in the room with the indifference of weather.

Serena hit the floor. Darius, who had come in behind Kael, dropped with the rest of them.

Darius was on his hands and knees when he found his voice. "You don't understand what she is." Strained. Careful. The voice of a man trying to sound reasonable while the floor was wet with his people's blood. "She manipulated my household. She tried to take my son. If you knew what she'd—"

Kael turned. He crossed to Darius in four steps, reached down, and closed one hand around his forearm. A single controlled movement. Pressure applied at a precise angle. The sound that followed was not small.

Darius's scream bounced off the walls. Serena's followed. Neither of them got up, and the entire room smelled of blood and fear, and everyone watching from the doorway had gone very, very quiet.

Kael turned back to me. I was still on my knees. My right hand was useless. The stone under me was wet and warm and I could not tell anymore what was mine and what belonged to someone else.

I didn't know what was going to happen. My heart was about to leap out of my chest.

He came toward me and bent down, slipped one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and lifted me out of the warm, sticky pool of blood as if I weighed nothing.

He held me tight. I could feel the heartbeat in his chest—steady, strong. My face pressed against him, and his scent surrounded me, overwhelming everything.

He lowered his head. The tip of his nose touched my neck, sliding slowly downward, like a beast scenting its prey.

His breath burned against the most fragile part of my skin—so hot I almost wanted to curl away. But I couldn't move. My body was no longer mine. It softened in his arms, melting into a strange, tingling warmth, as though it had finally been waiting for something it had longed for its whole life.

His lips touched me.

"My mate..." He whispered.