I AM YOUR MATE

Serena's POV

"Get on your knees."

The command hit me like a physical blow.

My legs trembled, but I refused to bend. Three powerful Alphas stood before me, their eyes glowing gold, while the man behind them watched me with a smile that made my stomach turn.

I was human enough to be terrified.

But I was also carrying the child of the most powerful Alpha alive.

"Where is the father?" the man asked, glancing at my stomach.

I said nothing.

He stepped closer. "Does Damien Blackthorne know you're pregnant?"

My heart stopped.

He laughed when he saw my face. "Oh, sweetheart. You really thought you could disappear with his heir and live happily ever after?"

I turned to run.

One of the Alphas caught my arm and slammed me against the wall. Pain shot through my shoulder, and I instinctively covered my stomach with both hands.

"Touch me again," I whispered, "and I'll make sure Damien—"

"Damien what?"

The man pulled out his phone and showed me a photograph.

Damien stood beside a woman in a white dress. His hand rested on her waist, and she was wearing a ring that looked suspiciously like a wedding band.

My breath caught.

"Your precious Alpha has bigger plans than chasing a woman who ran away," he said. "And when he learns about your child, he'll have to choose between his throne and his heir."

I stared at the photograph, fighting the tears burning my eyes.

Then his next words destroyed the last piece of hope I had.

"Your mate ordered us to find you."

For six years, I had believed Damien never knew where I went.

For six years, I had raised our son alone.

And now, someone was telling me that the man I had sacrificed everything to escape had been looking for me all along.

I swallowed hard.

"Where is my son?"

The man smiled.

"That's exactly what we're going to find out."

##CHAPTER ONE

The Man Who Bought My Worst Nightmare

POV: (Serena Vale)

The first time I saw Damien Blackthorne again, someone was trying to steal my company, my security system had gone blind, and a man was bleeding on my conference room floor.

Honestly, I would have preferred a normal Monday.

“Serena!” My head of security, Joel, shouted through my earpiece. “Get away from the windows!”

The glass wall behind me exploded.

I dropped before I had time to think. Shards scattered across the carpet, and something heavy struck the table where I had been standing seconds earlier. My laptop slid off the edge and smashed against the floor.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then the alarms started screaming.

“Everybody out!” I yelled.

Six investors scrambled toward the door. One knocked over a chair. Another abandoned his briefcase. I grabbed the tablet displaying our security network and ran after them, but the screen showed nothing except a red warning.

SYSTEM OVERRIDE. EXTERNAL ACCESS GRANTED.

No. That was impossible.

Veyne Systems had been built to stop this exact thing from happening.

I stopped beside the doorway and stared at the message. Someone had broken through three layers of encryption in less than two minutes. Whoever it was had not simply hacked us. They knew where to look.

“Serena, move!” Joel grabbed my arm.

A gunshot rang out from the corridor.

I jerked away from him, my heart slamming against my chest. Joel pulled me behind a concrete support column just as two men in black rushed past the conference room entrance.

One of them carried a case with my company's logo on it.

My blood ran cold.

They were not here for money.

They were here for my work.

“Who are they?” I whispered.

Joel checked his weapon. “People who knew exactly when to come.”

That answer frightened me more than the gunshot.

I had spent four years building Veyne Systems from a cramped office and a collection of borrowed equipment. We designed security software for wealthy clients, including several powerful supernatural families who preferred their private affairs to remain private.

My company was not just my income. It was my way out of a life where other people kept deciding what I deserved.

I was not going to let some armed idiots take it from me.

“Get the staff downstairs,” I told Joel. “I'm going to the server room.”

He looked at me as if I had announced plans to jump off the roof.

“Absolutely not.”

“My entire network is being accessed remotely. If they reach the main server, they can copy everything.”

“And if they reach you first?”

“Then you can tell my investors I died protecting their passwords.”

“Your sense of humor is terrible.”

“I'm under pressure.”

I slipped out before he could argue again.

The corridor smelled of smoke and burnt plastic. Emergency lights flashed overhead, turning the white walls red, then black, then red again. I kept one hand against the wall and the other wrapped around the tablet, following the blinking marker toward the server room.

Halfway there, a door opened.

I swung around, ready to hit whoever came through with the tablet.

A man caught my wrist.

“Careful.”

His voice was low, calm, and deeply irritating for someone who had just appeared in the middle of an armed attack.

I looked up.

And forgot, for one stupid second, how to breathe.

Damien Blackthorne stood in front of me in a perfectly fitted black suit. His dark hair was slightly disordered, but he looked as though he had stepped out of a private meeting rather than into a building under attack.

I remembered those eyes.

I remembered the last time I had been close enough to see them properly, five years ago. I remembered a hotel room, a night I had never explained to anyone, and the decision I had made before sunrise.

Leave. Do not look back.

I had followed that decision so completely that I had convinced myself I could never be forced to face him again.

Yet here he was, holding my wrist while gunmen ran through my company.

“Let go of me,” I said.

His gaze moved over my face. Something changed in his expression, so quickly I almost missed it.

“Serena?”

“Congratulations. You remember my name.”

He released me, but he did not step aside. “What are you doing here?”

I stared at him.

“In my office? During an attack? What do you think I'm doing?”

His jaw tightened. “You always did have a talent for making a bad situation worse.”

“And you always did have a talent for showing up where nobody wants you.”

A gunshot sounded behind us.

Damien moved before I could react, pulling me against the wall as a bullet struck the doorframe. His arm came around me, shielding my body. For one brief, confusing moment, I was pressed against him, close enough to catch the scent of his cologne.

Then another scent reached me.

Something warm, dark, and familiar.

My wolf stirred so violently that my knees almost gave way.

No! 

Not him.

Not after five years.

Damien went still too. His eyes dropped to mine, and I saw the same stunned recognition in his face.

The bond.

I had spent years avoiding the thought of him, and now my own wolf had chosen this exact moment to remind me of the one thing I could never control.

My mate.

Of all the men in the world, it had to be Damien Blackthorne.

He leaned closer, his voice rougher than before. “You feel it too.”

“This is not the time.”

“When would you prefer to discuss it? After someone puts a bullet through your head?”

“When you learn how to mind your own business.”

His mouth twitched, but the amusement disappeared when a man emerged at the end of the corridor.

The stranger raised his weapon.

Damien shoved me behind him.

“Stay there.”

“I don't take orders from you.”

“Serena.”

There was something in the way he said my name that made my wolf want to obey him. I hated it. I hated him a little more for having that effect on me.

The gunman fired.

Damien moved to the side, caught the man's wrist, and drove him into the wall. The weapon hit the floor. Before the attacker could recover, Damien struck him once in the stomach and once across the jaw.

The man crumpled.

I stared.

“Are you finished admiring me?” Damien asked without looking back.

“I was wondering if your ego comes with its own security team.”

“Only on special occasions.”

I almost laughed.

Almost.

Then I saw the blood running down his hand.

“You're hurt.”

“It's nothing.”

“That's what men say when they're about to bleed all over an expensive carpet.”

I reached for him, but he caught my fingers before I could touch the wound. His grip was firm, not painful. For a second, neither of us spoke.

The bond pulled at me, urging me closer.

I wanted to slap myself.

Five years ago, I had left him for a reason. Whatever my wolf thought, it did not get to erase that reason.

“Let go,” I said.

He did.

The space between us felt strangely colder.

Joel appeared around the corner with two guards behind him. “The lower floors are clear. We've got police on the way, but the intruders have reached the server room.”

My stomach dropped.

“How many?”

“Three confirmed. Possibly more.”

“Did they get the files?”

Joel hesitated.

That was answer enough.

I ran.

Damien followed, ignoring my furious demand that he stay behind. We reached the server room just as the final security door slammed shut. Through its narrow glass panel, I saw a man kneeling beside the main terminal, connecting a small black device to the system.

The screen beside him displayed a progress bar.

DATA TRANSFER: 82%.

“Open the door!” I shouted.

Joel punched in the emergency code. The panel flashed red.

“Access denied.”

“I'm the owner!”

“Someone changed the administrator credentials.”

I gripped the tablet so hard my fingers hurt. Whoever had done this knew our system well enough to lock me out of my own building.

The transfer climbed to eighty-six percent.

Damien stepped beside me. “Can you stop it?”

“Not from here.”

“Then what do you need?”

I looked at him, suspicious despite the urgency. “Why do you care?”

His eyes held mine.

“Because someone just attacked a company that holds sensitive information about my family. And because, whether you like it or not, I have no intention of watching you die.”

Before I could answer, Joel forced the emergency door open.

The man at the terminal turned toward us. His face was covered, but I could see the panic in his movements. He yanked the device free and sprinted toward the rear exit.

“Stop him!” I screamed.

Damien's guards took off after the intruder. I rushed to the terminal and typed my emergency command, forcing the system to disconnect from every external device.

The screen went black.

For one terrible second, I thought I had lost everything.

Then a new message appeared.

TRANSFER INTERRUPTED. PARTIAL FILE RECOVERY AVAILABLE.

I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding.

“Can you recover it?” Damien asked.

“Some of it.”

I opened the damaged file list, scanning names and timestamps. Most of the stolen data was encrypted, but one folder had already been copied before I stopped the transfer.

My fingers hovered over the screen.

The folder was labeled with a date from five years ago.

The night I had met Damien.

I opened it.

Inside was a photograph of me leaving a hotel, my face turned away from the camera. Beneath it sat a document with my full name, my birth date, and a line that made the room seem to tilt around me.

SUBJECT: SERENA VALE. OFFSPRING STATUS: CONFIRMED. PATERNAL MATCH: DAMIEN BLACKTHORNE.

I stopped breathing.

Damien moved closer. “What is it?”

I tried to close the file, but my hands had started shaking.

He saw the screen.

His face changed as he read the words.

“Serena,” he said slowly. “What does this mean?”

I could not answer.

Because five years ago, I had left Damien without telling him anything about the night we shared.

And six years ago, I had given birth to a little boy.

A little boy who had never met his father.

A little boy named Milo.

Damien stared at me, his voice suddenly cold.

“Do you have a child?”

Before I could speak, my phone rang.

The screen showed my son's school calling.

I answered with trembling fingers.

“Hello?”

A woman's frightened voice came through the line.

“Mrs. Vale, you need to come immediately. Milo has done something we don't understand.”

I gripped the phone. “What happened to my son?”

The woman hesitated.

Then she whispered, “He just ordered three adult Alphas to their knees, and none of them could disobey him.”

I looked at Damien.

For the first time since he had appeared in my corridor, he seemed genuinely afraid.

“Where is Milo?” he asked.

I pulled the phone away from my ear.

And the woman on the other end screamed.