The Alpha’s Mate Was Born To Die

Ianthe had learned a long time ago that most things disappear without proof.

Receipts faded. Bruises yellowed and went. A kind word from a stranger lasted exactly as long as it took the door to close behind them.

The tube light over the freezers had started buzzing again. It always did around midnight, like it was tired too. She wiped the counter anyway. It was already clean. A clean counter was the one thing in the store she could count on.

She'd been alone since ten. The closer had texted that he wasn't coming. She sent back a thumbs-up, because there was nobody to complain to who wouldn't tell her to be grateful for the hours. She wouldn't get paid for this shift. She never did for the extra ones.

Earlier, a man had come in for cigarettes. He counted his change out coin by coin and came up eighty cents short.

Ianthe took the difference from her own purse and rang it through.

He laughed at her. "Paying for strangers. Must be nice to be that stupid."

Then he squinted at her face. "What's wrong with your eyes? They're creepy. Pale like that."

"They've always been like that," she said.

"Well, they're creepy."

He grabbed his pack and left without looking back. She smiled at him anyway, out of habit. The smile was still there when the door shut.

It stung, but only for a second, like touching a hot pan. She'd learned to let things burn off.

She lived four bus stops away, in a room that was mostly a mattress and a window. She was twenty-eight and tired, and she'd made peace with both the way you make peace with a leaky roof. You stopped looking at the ceiling.

Her parents had died in a fire when she was small. She remembered almost nothing. Smoke. And a sound she had never been able to name.

People told her it was a mercy that she'd forgotten. She had never decided if they were right.

At ten past midnight, the door chimed.

Ianthe looked up with the smile ready. It faltered halfway.

The man who came in was dressed like anyone. Dark hood. Jacket zipped to his throat. But the air came in with him, cold and wrong. Under the smell of rain was something else. Wet fur. Something sour, like milk left out.

He didn't take a basket. He didn't look at the shelves. He walked down the aisle slowly, the way you cross ice you don't trust.

"Evening," she said. "Let me know if you need anything."

No answer. The hood turned toward her voice, then away.

He stopped at the end of the aisle, near the chips. It took her a moment to understand what he was doing. He was breathing in. Long and slow, the way people do outside a bakery.

Fine, she thought. Another one. Al-Halden after midnight was full of them. The drunk. The lost. The ones who just wanted to stare at someone behind a counter.

Her hand slid under the register, toward the phone.

Then he came to her. He stopped on the other side of the counter and tilted his head, slowly, like a dog hearing something far away.

"You smell wrong," he said. His voice was low. Almost pleasant.

"Sorry?"

"Not you. On you." He leaned over the counter, closer than anyone should, and breathed in again. His shoulders went still. "Where did you get it?"

"I don't..." Her mouth had gone dry. "Sir, I think you should go."

"That isn't yours." He said it like he was talking to himself. There was wonder in his voice, and the wonder scared her more than anything else so far. "A human. And it's all over her. Why would it be on a human?"

His hood slipped back. It was a man's face, but the jaw sat too long in it. When he smiled, there were too many teeth.

Ianthe stepped back. Her spine hit the cigarette rack. Packs clattered to the floor behind her.

"They'll want to know," he said. "They'll want to know about you."

His hand came over the counter. The fingers were too long. The nails weren't nails.

She couldn't scream. She couldn't even breathe.

The door didn't chime. It hit the wall.

A man filled the doorway, breathing hard, like he'd run a long way and hadn't stopped. He was tall and dark-skinned, his coat soaked through at the shoulders. He didn't look at Ianthe at all.

"Step away from her," he said.

He didn't shout. The quiet in it was worse.

The thing at the counter turned. Its mouth was still smiling. "You're late. I already know something you..."

It never finished.

Ianthe didn't see him cross the store. One second he was at the door. The next he was between her and the counter, and there was a sound like a branch breaking over a knee.

The creature folded and hit the floor. What lay there under the buzzing light wasn't quite a man anymore.

She realized she was gripping the counter hard enough to hurt.

Theron didn't move.

The hunt had been in his blood for three nights. It didn't drain out just because the thing was dead.

He stood and listened. Nothing else breathing in the store. No second set of footsteps outside. Nobody slipping away to carry this back to whoever had sent it.

He'd heard the start of that sentence. Something you. He would never hear the end.

He'd wanted it dead before it finished talking. Now the one thing that might have explained all of this was lying on the tile.

He turned to tell the woman to stay calm. And his wolf, which had been nothing but teeth a breath ago, went completely quiet.

Not calm. Quiet. Like a held breath.

She stood against the cigarette rack with her hands half raised. Her face was white. Her name tag sat crooked on her shirt. Just a woman. She smelled like rain and cheap soap and fear, and nothing else.

He had no reason to look at her twice.

Mine.

The word came from somewhere beneath thought. His wolf didn't ask. It didn't argue. It just knew, and the knowing went through him slowly, like a blade drawn from a sheath.

Theron had been warned how this would feel. Every Alpha of his line had been. He had spent thirty years hoping to be the one it passed over.

And she was staring at him. Not like someone who'd been rescued. Like someone who'd just watched a monster die and was still deciding which of them to be afraid of.

He had come here to remove a threat. Instead the night had set the one person who could ruin him in front of him, behind a counter, under a flickering light.

He knew what happened to the women the wolf chose.

Every Alpha before him had found her. Every one had held her for as long as the curse allowed. Then it took her anyway.

His wolf wanted him to cross the room. He stayed where he was.

Mine.

And the curse, Theron knew, had just chosen her too.