004

I stayed in my room like Sara told me to. It's only for a while anyway. I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the silence and told myself to stay put. Sara was scared and Sara knew this palace better than I did. If she said don't come out then I shouldn't come out. That was the logical thing. The smart thing. But my chest had other ideas.

It started maybe ten minutes after Sara left. That warmth I felt the night before came back except this time it wasn't warm at all. It was tight and urgent, like something pulling at me from the inside and getting stronger every minute I ignored it. I pressed my hand against my chest and tried to breathe through it. My wolf stirred.

Not the faint barely-there movement from last night. This was stronger. It almost felt like a push. Like she was trying to get me to stand up and move.

I told her no. But I lasted another few minutes before I heard something from somewhere deep in the palace. I couldn't even describe it properly. It wasn't just a sound. It was like the whole building felt it. A crash, then something that sounded like it came from an animal but bigger and more wrong than any animal should sound.

My body stood up before I made the decision to stand.

I genuinely tried to stop myself. I stood at my door for a good moment with my hand on it telling myself that going out there was one of the stupidest things I could do. I survived the first night. I shouldn't push my luck. I should sit back down and wait for morning.

Then my wolf pushed again and I opened the door.

The hallways were completely empty. Every single servant was gone. Doors were closed and the whole palace felt abandoned in a way that made my skin prickle. I followed the pull in my chest because I didn't have any other direction to go in and honestly at this point I'd stopped pretending I had a choice.

I heard him before I saw him. I turned a corner and stopped immediately.

The room ahead had its doors blown open. One of them was hanging off its hinge. Inside I could see things were destroyed. Furniture, objects, a whole section of wall that looked like something had gone through it. The air in there felt different, heavy and electric in a way I'd never felt before.

Alexander was in the middle of it.

I had thought he was terrifying the first night. That was nothing compared to this. His eyes were completely different, not the cold controlled rage I saw before but something that wasn't fully him anymore. His whole presence was wrong, like looking at someone whose body is there but the person inside is somewhere else entirely. He was losing himself and everything around him was paying for it.

I should have turned around. My legs walked me forward instead.

I don't know how to explain what happened next because I didn't think it through. There was no plan. My body just knew what to do before my brain caught up with any of it. I walked toward him even as every sensible part of me was screaming not to and when I got close enough I reached out and put my hand on him.

The warmth left me so fast it shocked me. It poured out of my hand and into him like it had been waiting to go there. I felt it moving through me from somewhere deep and then leaving all at once. It wasn't painful exactly but it took something with it. Like it was pulling from a place I didn't know I had.

He went still at once, like someone had reached in and turned something off. The energy in the room changed immediately. The heaviness lifted. He stopped and his breathing slowed and he just stood there.

I stood there too. My legs felt wrong. My whole body felt like it had been emptied out and I hadn't even noticed how much it took until it was already gone. I tried to stay upright and my vision did something unsteady that I didn't like at all.

I didn't understand what I just did. I genuinely had no explanation for any of it. All I knew was that something had passed between us and he was calm and I could barely stand up.

I didn't even get a chance to figure out what I was feeling about it. I heard something at the door and looked up. Diana was standing there.

She had clearly been there for a little while because her expression told me she saw everything. For just a second, one small second, she looked afraid. Actually afraid. Her eyes were wide and there was something in her face that looked almost like panic.

Then it disappeared. Just like that her expression closed off completely and became smooth and unreadable. She looked at me, then at Alexander, then back at me. And I watched her think. I could almost see her deciding something right there in the doorway.

My stomach dropped before she even moved. I was drained and I could barely stay on my feet and I still knew with complete certainty what that look on her face meant.

"Are you going to explain what you were doing here to me or should I force you to say it out?" she acts like she's the queen and I'm just a servant to her.

I mean, technically I'm not an important anyway since she was already given the rights to treat me as much as she could here. Coming here was the wrong thing and since I was able to help him probably he would not kill me anymore right?

"I just thought I could help him since his mate, I didn't mean to do anything else. You can check him, I didn't do anything to him." I said immediately to defend myself and she looked at me like she was disgusted.

"You're his mate. You think you're ready to be called his mate?"

What's that supposed to mean? I'm not worthy?