THE MATE HE COULDN'T CLAIM

Chapter 1

Wolf Unleashed

POV: Adelina McKenna

I always thought pain had a limit.

A ceiling.

A point where your body just gives up and lets the darkness take you. Where screaming doesn’t matter anymore, because your mind detaches floating above the agony like some merciful ghost waiting to be released.

But no one tells you that your first shift into a wolf breaks that rule.

My mother tried to warn me. She’d seen it once before, in the parking lot of a run-down gas station outside of Ashland. A rogue had collapsed screaming, his bones twisting like they were being pulled by puppet strings. The whole shift took less than a minute.

Mine took hours.

And no one was there.

Just me, the full moon, and the betrayal of my own body.

It began with the itching.

A deep, crawling itch under my skin, like static electricity was building between muscle and bone. I was walking home from a night shift at the diner double apron, grease stains on my sneakers, exhausted to my core.

Then suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

Not like a little wheeze or a gasp. No. It was like the air had been vacuumed out of my lungs, and all I could do was drop to my knees on the side of the highway, clutching my ribs as fire clawed its way up my spine.

I remember the sound I made. A wounded-animal kind of cry. Not human.

Something in me howled back.

Then came the bones.

They don’t gently bend or ease into place like some romantic shifter movie would have you believe. They crack. They break. They rearrange like an avalanche happening inside your skin. My fingernails split as claws pushed through. My jaw snapped sideways. I screamed until my throat was raw.

And still no release. No shift.

Just agony.

I must have blacked out more than once. When I opened my eyes, I was face down in the grass, my body halfway there. My spine arched in an impossible curve. My skin tore and knitted back together, only to tear again. It was like being birthed through your own body. Every nerve ending was a live wire.

Then it stopped.

And I stood—not on two legs, but four.

Everything was different.

The night was no longer just shadows and stars. I saw the heat of a rabbit in the bushes before it even moved. I heard the heartbeat of a deer grazing nearly a mile away. I smelled oil and rubber from a car that had passed over the asphalt fifteen minutes earlier.

But more than that—I felt everything.

I felt the moon. Like a lover. Like a mother. Like a call I never knew I had been waiting to answer.

Run, it whispered.

So I did.

I ran until my legs burned and my lungs ached—not from pain, but from joy. My paws thundered across the forest floor. Branches whipped past me. Wind sang in my ears. I felt free. No apron, no greasy hairnet, no bills stacked on the kitchen table.

Just the wolf. Wild and unashamed.

But freedom doesn't last.

It never does.

When the sun started to rise, the shift ended as brutally as it began.

One moment I was a queen of the night.

The next, I was naked, shivering, curled under a pine tree and covered in dirt and blood. My blood. I don’t even know where half the cuts came from. Maybe the forest. Maybe my own body turning inside out again.

I remember crawling back toward the road. My hands my real hands scraping across rocks. Every breath was shallow and aching. By the time I reached the shoulder, the morning commuters had started.

No one stopped.

Who would?

Naked girl, looking like she crawled out of a warzone. Probably some cracked-out runaway, they thought. Junkie, maybe.

But one car did stop.

A black SUV with tinted windows.

It didn’t belong in our town. That car screamed money. Aspen kind of money. And when the passenger door opened, and a man in a gray suit stepped out with mirrored sunglasses and the kind of posture you can’t buy at Walmart, I knew deep in my bones that this wasn’t a coincidence.

He handed me a blanket. Said my name like it was already his. “Adelina McKenna?”

I didn’t have the strength to answer.

“You’re being summoned.”

It took three hours for me to warm up enough to ask him what the hell that meant.

He didn’t say much. Just handed me a sealed envelope with a wax sigil I didn’t recognize and returned to the driver's seat.

I opened it with shaking fingers.

TO: ADELINE MCKENNA

You are hereby summoned to Aspen, Colorado, under Order 7 of the Werewolf Accord. Your presence is required within 72 hours to undergo confirmation of the mate bond by the Silver Fang Pack.

Fated Pairing Identified: Alpha Daxon Reyes.

Failure to comply will be seen as forfeiture of status, protection, and pack claim.

Council of Bloodlines, Reyes Dynamics

I read it five times.

My hands trembled. Not from cold. From something worse.

Mate bond?

Alpha?

Daxon freaking Reyes?

I’d seen his face before on Forbes magazine covers, news headlines, tech conferences. Billionaire wolf

. Pack prince. CEO of Reyes Dynamics. He looked like something chiseled from ancient marble and cursed to rule alone.

That was the man they were claiming was my mate?

Me

. Adelina McKenna. The girl who barely scraped together rent. Who hadn't even known she was a wolf until twelve hours ago.