CHAPTER TWO

Ryker's POV

Aunt Delara had been talking for twenty minutes without stopping.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was that every single sentence — regardless of where it started, regardless of what detour it took through pack history or family legend or the particular wisdom she had accumulated over sixty-three years of living — looped back to the same destination, with the patience and precision of water finding its way downhill.

"I'm not saying you aren't trying," she said, refilling her tea from the clay pot between us like she was settling in for the long version. "I'm saying that trying looks different depending on the person. Your father found your mother in six months. Six. And he wasn't even looking."

"He wasn't looking because he didn't believe in the bond," I said. "You've told me that story a hundred times."

"And yet somehow you've never learned anything from it." She set the pot down and looked at me over the rim of her cup — the expression she'd been perfecting since I was seven years old. Part patience, part steel, entirely impossible to argue with. "You're thirty-eight, Ryker."

"I'm aware of how old I am."

"Then act like it." She leaned back in her chair. "An Alpha without a mate is a ship without ballast. You are powerful, yes. The pack respects you, yes. But there is a part of you that is unanchored, and everyone who loves you can see it even when you cannot."

I looked out the window of her sitting room rather than answer that.

The compound grounds were quiet in the late afternoon — two young pack members crossing the courtyard below, a patrol returning through the eastern gate, the mountains sitting heavy and grey at the horizon the way they always did. I had built something real here. I had held this pack together through territorial wars, political betrayals, and three challenges to my Alpha status that I had ended decisively and without apology. I had done all of it, every piece of it, without a mate beside me.

I had done it well. That much was not arrogance — it was simply true.

But Delara wasn't entirely wrong, and I wasn't willing to lie to her face.

"I've been searching," I said. "I extended the patrol radius six weeks ago because the instinct has been stronger lately. Like she's close. Like something is shifting." I turned back from the window. "But I cannot manufacture a mate, Delara. Either the bond activates or it doesn't. Either she exists within reach or she doesn't. There is nothing I can do to force it."

She opened her mouth — I could already tell it was going to be sharp and accurate — and then the knock came.

"Alpha." Caden's voice, through the door. He was one of my border guards, reliable in the particular way that meant he did not knock on doors unnecessarily. His tone carried the specific quality that told me something had happened that didn't fit into any existing category. "I apologize for the interruption. We found something at the eastern border."

"A something or someone?"

A brief pause. "Someone, sir. A young woman — human. Collapsed just inside the tree line near the gap in the patrol rotation. She was unconscious when we found her."

I was already standing.

A human. I turned that over once in my mind and couldn't make it fit any reasonable explanation. Humans did not wander into Bloodmoon territory — not accidentally, not anymore. Our borders weren't marked on any map they could access, but the supernatural community knew where our lines were, and the humans who lived close enough had developed, over generations, a useful instinct for where not to walk. A human woman, unconscious, at our eastern border, was not a coincidence I had a framework for.

"Show me," I said.

Delara called something after me as I left — something about this being exactly the kind of disruption an unanchored Alpha invited into his life. The words didn't catch. I was already moving.

---

They had laid her on the ground near the base of a wide oak, and two of my guards stood over her with the careful posture of men who weren't sure what they were dealing with.

She was small. Genuinely small — the kind that made the leaf-covered ground beneath her look too hard, the late afternoon air too cold. Her clothing was wrong for the forest, thin and torn in places, and her dark hair was spread around her in the dirt like she'd simply stopped mid-motion and fallen. There was a cut along her jaw, dried dark. Her chest was rising and falling in the slow rhythm of unconsciousness.

I crossed the distance between us, and then I stopped.

It hit me like a wall.

Pressure behind the sternum, sudden and total — a disorientation, the world rearranging itself slightly around a new fixed point. My wolf went absolutely still inside me for one suspended second. Not dormant. Not retreating. Still, the way an animal goes still when it finally recognizes something it has been searching for across a very long distance.

*Mate.*

The word wasn't in my voice. It was deeper than that — older than language, a recognition that bypassed thought entirely and landed somewhere at the center of me like an answer to a question I had quietly stopped letting myself ask.

She was human. She was unconscious and bleeding and lying in the dirt at my eastern border.

And she was mine.

I was beside her in three strides. I crouched, pressed two fingers to the side of her throat — her pulse was there, thin and fast, but steady — and then I gathered her up off the ground the way you lift something irreplaceable. Carefully. Both arms. Making sure her head was supported.

She weighed almost nothing.

"Get the healer." I was already turning back toward the compound. "Not the junior one. Mirela. Tell her it's urgent and tell her to meet me in the main house." I glanced back at the guards. "Now. Move."

They moved.

---

I carried her through the compound without stopping to answer the questions forming on the faces of the pack members I passed. My room was on the upper floor of the main house, and that was where I took her — not the guest quarters, not the medical room on the ground floor. My room. The place most protected, where nothing entered without my explicit permission.

I laid her on the bed and stood over her, watching her breathe.

Mirela arrived in seven minutes — faster than expected, which told me Caden had delivered the message with appropriate urgency. She was a small, grey-haired woman who had been healing this pack since before my father's time and who had never once been intimidated by my Alpha status, which I had always respected.

She looked at the girl. She looked at me. She read something in my face and asked no questions at all, which was the correct response.

"Give me room," she said.

I stepped back three feet. That was all the room she was getting.

Mirela worked efficiently — checking pulse and temperature, pressing carefully along the girl's ribs, examining the cut on her jaw and the bruising I could now see darkening her wrists. Then she mixed herbs from her bag with something from a small vial, added warm water, and tilted the cup carefully to the girl's lips.

For thirty seconds, nothing happened.

Then she coughed — sharp and sudden — and her eyes opened. Dark brown, wide, and immediately frightened. She looked at the ceiling first, then the walls, then Mirela, then me.

"Where am I?" Her voice was rough and very small. "Please — please don't hurt me."

I crossed the room before I'd consciously decided to and sat on the edge of the bed. She flinched back against the headboard. Something in my chest responded to that — complicated and immediate — and I kept my movements deliberately slow, reaching out to lay one hand lightly over hers where it gripped the sheets.

"You're safe," I said, and I made my voice as quiet as I knew how to make it. "You are not in danger. I need you to hear me — you are safe here."

She was shaking. She looked at me with those dark eyes like she was measuring whether the words matched something she could trust, and I held her gaze and let her look, because I had nothing to hide from her. The bond in my chest was a steady, low warmth — the most certain thing I had felt in years — and holding still felt like the most important thing I had ever been asked to do.

Slowly, her shaking reduced by degrees.

---

Mirela left an hour later, setting three small vials on the bedside table with careful instructions I memorized before she finished giving them. The girl — Zara, she'd told me, barely above a whisper, when I asked — was sitting up against the headboard now. Still pale. Still faintly shaking. But her eyes were tracking properly, and the acute fear in them had settled into something more cautious.

I sat in the chair beside the bed rather than loom over her.

"What were you doing near my border?" I asked. "Humans don't generally come through that part of the forest."

A brief hesitation moved across her face — controlled, quick. "I don't fully remember," she said. "I was running. There were men — I think they work for slavers. They had me, and I got away, and I just ran. I didn't know where I was going. I ran until I couldn't anymore."

I studied her. The explanation had the shape of truth — her eyes didn't slide away, her voice stayed even while her hands didn't. The bruising on her wrists was real. The cut on her jaw was real.

"Do you have family?" I asked. "Someone we can contact?"

She shook her head. "No family. I've been on my own for a long time." A pause. "There's no one waiting for me."

I looked at her for a long moment, and then I moved from the chair to the edge of the bed and put my arms around her — carefully, the way you hold something you were afraid of losing before you even had it. She went very still against me.

"You don't have to be afraid anymore," I told her, and I meant it with a depth that surprised even me. "From this moment, you will not know suffering. You are mine to protect, and I will spend everything I have making sure you are never afraid again. Do you understand? You are not alone anymore."

She didn't respond.

I pulled back to look at her and found her eyes closed, her breathing evening into the slow rhythm of sleep. She had gone under completely — her body finally surrendering to whatever she had been running from.

I sat there another minute, watching her, feeling the warm weight of the bond in my chest like something I had given up expecting.

Then I stood, covered her carefully, and walked out.

Caden was waiting in the corridor. The look on his face made me pause.

"What?"

"The slave traders who work the eastern routes," he said, keeping his voice low. "We confirmed they came through safely last night. No disturbances. No escapes reported." He held my gaze. "There is no record of a girl matching her description being taken or running, Alpha. I checked three times."

I felt the stillness move through me — different from the one in the forest. Colder. "Then they made an error," I said. "Or she was taken by a smaller operation that doesn't file reports."

"Alpha —"

"She is not a suspect." I kept my voice even. "She is not a case. No one questions her. No one investigates where she came from." I held his gaze. "She is my mate. And she will be treated as such. Do you understand me?"

Caden was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was carefully neutral. "Understood. I only hope you don't come to regret it."

I looked back at the closed door of my room once. Then I turned and walked down the corridor.

I had waited thirty-eight years to feel what I'd felt the moment I stepped through that tree line and found her. Whatever questions existed at the edges of her story, I trusted the bond more than I trusted anyone's records.

She was mine. That was the only thing that mattered.

For now.