The Alpha's Betrayed Mate: Ten Years Behind Bars

ELARIS POV

The gates of Blackthorn Correctional Facility shut behind me with a sound I had heard ten thousand times from the other side, a heavy metallic groan followed by a clang that rattled through my ribs, and the strangest part was that it still made my shoulders flinch even though it was supposed to be the sound of my freedom. I stood on the cracked pavement in a gray dress that no longer fit the woman I had become, holding a clear plastic bag that contained everything I owned: a few folded papers, a cracked hairbrush, and forty-two dollars the state had decided was enough to restart a life. The morning air bit at my face, sharp and cold and smelling of wet leaves and diesel, and I breathed it in so deeply that my lungs ached, because for ten years the air I had breathed had tasted of bleach and old metal and other people's despair.

I was twenty-eight years old. I had walked into that building at eighteen, a girl who still believed that if she was kind enough and quiet enough, the people she loved would eventually choose her back.

I turned in a slow circle, searching the empty road for a familiar face, and I hated myself for how long I let my eyes linger. There were no flowers, no open arms, no stepmother crying crocodile tears for the cameras, and not even a stranger holding a sign with my name on it. Maevra had told me my father died while I was locked away, and I had never been allowed to see a grave, a certificate, or even a photograph, which meant that grief had sat inside me for years like a stone I was never permitted to bury. Nobody had written to me in a decade, and nobody had come for me now, so I tightened my fingers around the bag and told myself that I had survived worse than loneliness, even though the words tasted like a lie.

The bus stop was half a mile down the road, and I started walking toward it with my head up, because prison had taught me that the moment you look lost is the moment someone decides you are prey. Cars rushed past me far faster than I remembered cars moving, and a woman jogged by with something glowing in her ear and a phone the size of her whole hand, and I realized with a hollow drop in my stomach that the world had kept spinning without me and had not bothered to slow down. I was counting my money for the third time, trying to work out how far forty-two dollars could stretch before I needed a bed, when the low purr of an engine slowed beside me and a long black car rolled to a stop at the curb.

Every instinct I had sharpened inside those walls screamed at once. Expensive cars did not stop for women like me unless someone wanted something, and I had learned that lesson in blood, so I kept walking and quickened my pace until the back door opened and a tall man in a dark suit stepped out and said, very calmly, "Miss Elaris Veyne?"

My feet stopped before my mind gave permission. Nobody had called me by my name in years, only by a number stitched on my chest, and hearing it spoken with courtesy made my throat tighten in a way I resented.

"Who's asking?" I said, and my voice came out rougher than I intended, scraped raw from years of keeping it low.

"My name is Dorian, and I work for Alpha Kaiven Thornevale." He said the title as if it should mean something to me, and it did, because even in prison the guards lowered their voices when they spoke of the Thornevales, the family that held Veylcrest Territory in its fist. "He sent me to bring you somewhere safe, and he asked me to tell you that you are under no obligation to come."

I laughed, a short, humorless sound that startled even me. "An Alpha doesn't send a car for a convicted murderer out of the goodness of his heart. Whatever he wants, tell him I'm not for sale, and I'm not a favor he can collect."

Dorian did not flinch, and he did not try to smooth my words into something gentler, which was the first thing that made me hesitate. "He doesn't want anything from you, Miss Veyne. He wants to thank you, because you saved someone he loves."

The cold air seemed to vanish. Suddenly I was nineteen again, standing in a prison corridor that stank of mildew, watching three women corner a frail, silver-haired stranger against the wall while one of them raised a blade that caught the flickering light. I remembered how my heart hammered, how every rule I had learned told me to look away, and how I had stepped forward anyway, taking a slash across my forearm that I still carried as a pale ridge beneath my sleeve. The woman I had saved had held my bleeding arm and whispered that she would never forget me, and I had assumed, like everything else people promised in that place, that it would dissolve the moment the doors opened.

"Lady Yseldra," I breathed.

"She has asked about you every year for ten years," Dorian said, and for the first time his composure softened into something that looked like genuine feeling. "She did not know when your release would be until last week, and the moment she did, she told her son she would not sleep until you were safe. He has already begun arranging identification, clothing, and a place for you to stay, but none of it is conditional, and none of it requires your gratitude. He only asked that I tell you one more thing, that if you would rather take the money and walk away, the offer stands and nobody will follow you."

I stared at the open door, at the leather seats and the faint warmth drifting out, and everything in me wanted to run in the opposite direction, because trust had been the price I paid for ten years of my life. But beneath the fear sat a quieter, braver truth I had not expected to feel, that I was tired of letting fear make every decision for me, and that the woman who stepped between a knife and a stranger had not died behind those gates after all. I also thought of the question that had haunted me since the day Maevra told me my father was gone, the question nobody had ever allowed me to ask out loud.

"If I come with you," I said slowly, "will your Alpha help me find out what really happened to my father? Because I have never seen proof that he died, and I am done accepting what people tell me without evidence."

Dorian held my gaze for a long moment before he answered. "He said you would ask that, and he said to tell you that he is already looking."

Something loosened inside my chest, a knot I had carried so long I had forgotten it was not part of my body. I drew one more breath of that freezing, imperfect, glorious free air, glanced back once at the gates that had swallowed a third of my life, and climbed into the car on my own two feet, because for the first time in ten years the choice was mine and I intended to remember what it felt like to make it.