The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate .Chapter 18: moving forward .“Courage is not the absence of fear, they say. Rather, it is that which fears, but will walk through the darkest of it anyway.”Mattel taps an idle rhythm against the skin of Regina’s neck, beating in time with Regina’s pounding heart.“I guess I should hold some belief to your claim of me being your mate because a king’s Luna must possess a dragonheart, to be so brave as to walk through fear untouched.”Regina breathes.******NEXT DAY**Regina awakens to a room that is not her own.In the light of day - sunlight streaming through wide-open windows, bathing the entire floor in a warm glow - it’s almost unrecognizable.The entire room is submerged in the ghoulish, inky blackness of earlier - every inch of the four walls, the entirety of the floor, is bathed in that gruesome pitch darkness, gaping and incomprehensibly terrifying.Slowly, still caught in between consciousness and that hazy world of dreams, she sits up, the s
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 19: odd intimacy .“But I hope you realize, that Alpha Mattel is the reason I am alive today.”The maid’s eyes, wide and shocked, snap up to meet her gaze.“That sounds a tad generous,” a low voice shocks them both.Regina whirls around, hand clutched to her chest in a vain attempt to calm her pounding heart.She gapes at the sight of King Mattel, standing in her own bedroom, gazing at her with an amused little smile.Regina whirls around, hand clutched to her chest in a vain attempt to calm her pounding heart. She gapes at the sight of King Mattel, standing in her own bedroom, gazing at her with an amused little smile.“How did you- I did not hear your door opening.”“I do not need something as trivial as doors,” Mattel drawls, somehow managing to convey a sense of condescension in the word doors.Regina stares, uncomprehending.“When the shadows themselves are my domain, I do not need to walk down halls and open doors.”Behind her, Regina hea
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 20: same old-same old .She’s been sold off like a particularly undesirable cattle by her only relative, to the man they only whisper about cautiously in the safety of their own homes, as the nightmare specter in human form.She has had to leave everything - her home, her belongings, and the only family she has ever known and loved - for unfamiliar lands, in what she had long thought would be a terrifying lair fit for a monster.She has been waylaid by frightening bandits, nearly lost her life, and then witnessed other men lose theirs, in a display of the most terrifying power she has ever laid eyes upon.Regina finds that she can’t quite express any of this, and instead, clings to Mattel’s gloved hand with a desperation that likely makes little sense to the Alpha.Mattel, rather than face that heavy, searching gaze, looks instead at the pile of packages beside them, feeling his heart lift with every familiar item he sees in their midst.When M
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 21: sleep over .That night, Regina stays up late once more, organizing the truly astounding number of parcels she now has in her room.(Had she truly purchased this many things, she wonders.)She’s halfway through organizing some of the items on her vanity, when she hears it.That quiet, muffled whimper, this time all the louder for how acutely her sense are attuned to the sound.This time, she wastes little time in letting herself through the door (and realizing, then, that while she can lock her side, King Mattel cannot, and wondering what the implications are that the man had crafted a proverbial cage for himself to be locked into).When she sees the floors and walls, once more, covered in that endless blackness, she can’t help the fear that, again, rushes up inside of her like a dam had broken.But she cannot leave King Mattel as he is, in whatever pained hell he has trapped himself into-In the nights I spend in this monstrous form, I beg
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 22: birth of a star.Regina wakes first.This time, she awakens with the immediate and keen awareness of precisely where she is - that is to say, not her own bed, but the one she’d just shared with King Mattel.Alpha Mattel, who, when Regina looks to her right, is evidently still asleep.Regina can’t help but to stare.In sleep, the Alpha’s features seem impossibly young - with none of the heavy presence that bears on him like an ever-present weight when the king is awake.It’s something about his eyes, Regina thinks; those dark, fathomless depths that speak of years much, much beyond the king’s age of twenty nine.(And there’s a fascination here, too, of being permitted to observe such a feared man from up close - not unlike being permitted into a tiger’s den, when the ferocious tiger is declawed in its slumber.)“If you leaned in any closer, one would think it is my person people should worry about, rather than yours,” the low, gravelly timbe
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 22: transfer of emotions .Mattel’s never slept so well in the twenty nine years he’s been alive, as he does now.Born with the curse of being permitted to command all those wraiths, terrors and horrors that haunt the minds of men,Mattel had learned, early on, that being able to command something did not mean the same thing as being immune to those same terrors.Most nights, ever since he’d manifested his curse side effects as a young child, he’d found his dreamless sleep plagued by the same terrible things that he can command unto others.As he’d explained to Regina, these shadows cannot kill him the way he can kill others with them. But that does not change the fact that, each night, he nearly dreads sleep with the anticipation of an endless, all-consuming despair.Even if the terrors don’t visit him every night, the nights when he is given the brief reprieve, he spends trembling in fear, anyway, teeth grit and back ramrod straight, bracing
Alpha Easton’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 24: just because .“Was it the shadows?” he asks.Regina shakes her head.Mattel glances at her with a sharp eye, as if to ascertain whether Regina is telling the truth, or simply shielding Mattel from the guilt he wears like an ever-present crown.“The bandits,” Regina murmurs simply, eyes fixed on the sheets in front of her.She feels childish for being so consumed still by a fear of something so trivial.Ashamed to even voice her trifling fear aloud, to a man who’s spent most of his nights haunted by unspeakable terrors.It reminds her, acutely, of how little use she’d ever been to her step father, as feeble and powerless as she is. Of all the things that he must have seen in her, missing and lacking in every way.She bites her lip hard enough to taste blood.Mattel, without a word, reaches over to flick on the lamp beside the bed.Regina curls her fingers into the sheets, shame curling in her stomach with that familiar pang. “I know it is foo
The Alpha King’s Runaway Mate.Chapter 25: power of a pretty face .Except, Regina doesn’t quite let the matter rest.The next morning, with much effort, she manages to rise early enough to follow Mattel to his practice match with Lionel.She reaches the courtyard just in time to see Mattel narrowly avoid being skewered by the sharp end of Lionel’s sword, and can’t help the quiet squeak that flits from her lips at the near-miss.Mattel’s eyes snap to her, having just noticed her presence.Lionel seizes the opportunity to slam the butt end of his sword into Mattel’s side, sending him clattering to the floor.“Alpha!”Regina doesn’t think that she’s ever run so fast in her life as when she flits to Mattel’s crumpled side, worry pounding in her chest. “Are you alright?”Mattel, where he’s sitting on the ground in the middle of sending a particularly scathing look in Lionel’s direction, turns his incredulous gaze to Regina, next.Regina, who’s gingerly grasping his arm and trying (unhel