Chapter Four: My Mate is Wolfless

            Eramon

Corrick’s blood was still warm on my hand when he found his voice again.

“Who the hell let you in here?” His scream cracked high and pathetic, nothing like the smug bastard who’d been holding a whip thirty seconds ago. He scrambled backward, clutching the stump of his wrist, staring at me like I was something that had crawled up out of the ground to ruin his night.

Funny. That was actually close to accurate.

“Do you have any idea what you just did? Do you know who I am? I’ll have your fucking head for this.”

I didn’t bother answering. Men like Corrick only ever asked do you know who I am once they’d already figured out the answer wasn’t going to help them.

“Guards!” He snapped his head toward the men lining the walls. “What are you standing there for?”

Not one of them moved.

He looked around at every frozen face refusing to meet his eyes, real panic finally cracking through the fury. He turned back to me because he had nothing else left to turn to.

“You’ll hang for this,” he spat, hauling himself upright against his desk, blood soaking through his sleeve. “Whoever the hell you think you are—”

“Enough with your nonsense.” I didn’t raise my voice. He flinched anyway.

Two hundred years out of the game hadn’t touched that particular skill, apparently.

“A lot of audacity, speaking to me like that.” I let my tone drip with boredom. “Keep your tongue in check, unless you’d like me to relieve you of the second arm as well. I didn’t spend two hundred years trapped under a curse to come back and listen to a peasant address me like we’re equals.”

He debated, visibly, whether to speak again. “This is my house. You break in, you cripple me in front of my own men, and you have the nerve to lecture me?”

I tilted my head, mocking. “This is your house?”

I took a step forward. He scrambled two back.

“Yes.” Forced out through gritted teeth.

“And you are an Alpha?” Two more steps.

“Yes.”

A humorless smile pulled at my mouth. “Then you already know the consequences of laying your hands on another Alpha’s mate.”

His eyes went wide. “Mate? No, she’s wolfless. Look at her.” A laugh, half a wheeze. “Not even a drunk would settle for her.”

My jaw locked. He noticed instantly, some animal part of him understanding exactly how close he’d come to losing more than a hand.

He whipped toward her parents instead. “It was them. They never said she was wolfless, or I swear to the Moon I wouldn’t have touched her.”

I let my gaze slide to the two people apparently responsible for raising her, somehow even less impressive than Corrick.

“She’s wolfless,” the mother said fast, like getting the facts out first would absolve her. “Since birth. Never awakened a wolf, never been mated. She couldn’t possibly be your—”

“If you were even half the Alpha these people think you are,” I said, done entertaining any of them, “you’d know there are consequences for touching what belongs to another man. Wolf or no wolf.”

I didn’t explain the rest. I didn’t owe this room a lesson in how a bond worked.

“I’m leaving with her,” I said, to the room now. “Anyone with a problem can bring it up with me directly. I’d enjoy that far more than any of you would.”

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

I turned to her.

She was still on the ground where she’d fallen, face pale, the same pain in her eyes I remembered from the forest. Her leg was still bent wrong beneath her, nobody in this house had bothered to look at it, let alone treat it. Something ugly turned over low in my chest.

I crouched to her level. “You didn’t think to mention you’d been left bleeding all night.”

She flinched at that, which, fair, it wasn’t gentle. I didn’t have the patience left for soft words after watching a room full of grown men do nothing while she was dragged across the floor.

I didn’t wait for her to try standing. I gathered her up, one arm under her knees, the other bracing her back. She went rigid for half a second before something in her decided fighting wasn’t worth what strength she had left.

I carried her out without looking back.

By the time we reached my estate, I had gotten her wounds properly cleaned and bandaged. 

I set her on the edge of the bed, crouched in front of her, and slowky reached up to touch her face anyway.

Two hundred years buried under a curse gave a man plenty of time to build fantasies about a moment like this one. I’d spent most of it convinced that if I ever clawed my way out, and the Moon Goddess saw fit to hand me a mate worth the wait, some part of her would already know me. That the bond alone would be enough.

“You’re really here,” I said, more to myself than her, thumb brushing the bruise on her cheekbone. “After everything. You’re actually here.”

She knocked my hand away before I’d finished the sentence.

“Who exactly are you?” Small, but fire underneath it. “How did you find me? What do you even want from me?”

I stilled, more offended than I had any right to be. “Do you not remember me?”

“The naked drunk from the forest,” she said, flat, unimpressed.

Something in my chest spiked, hot and sudden. She didn’t feel it. No recognition. No pull. Nothing behind her eyes that suggested any part of her understood what she was to me.

I pulled back, dragging a hand down my face, temper flaring before I shoved it down where it belonged. It would have been easier for both of us to lash out the way two hundred years of instinct wanted. But watching her flinch again, that same raw pain still sitting behind her eyes, killed most of the anger before it caught.

Titling my head, realization finally

settled in. “It seems your memories from two hundred years ago are yet to return.”