The Alpha's Second Bond

(Lyra) The first thing I felt as I opened my eyes was the cold. It was as though I had just woken up from a long nightmare and all my limbs were frozen in place due to the horror. The cold cut through my skin as I struggled to come to recognize my surroundings. My head was heavy but I was determined to figure out where I was. I heard the sound of a door creaking open but it wasn't louder then the pounding in my head which was like a thousand drums. I blinked again. Wooden beams above the ceiling stared down at me. A small window by my side let in rays of the morning sun which did little to keep me from shivering from the cold. Where am I? I sat up too fast and the pain exploded behind my eyes causing me to groan in pain. My hand held both sides of my head in a bid to cushion the pain but it did nothing. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I didn't know where I was but worse, I didn't know who I was. My heart pounded in fear as I scanned the room I was in. Wooden beams, p

(Lyra) The peace hit me like sunlight shining into a frozen room. It was wrong. It was strange. I didn’t even know him, yet some part of me reached toward him as though he were the anchor I had been drifting toward my whole life. For some reason, I could smell his scent…..Cedar wood and wild roses. It was overwhelming and I wished the scent would never leave my nose. The Alpha was seated behind a massive darkwood desk. His posture was straight, his broad shoulders square, his hands resting lightly and too lightly on the armrests of his chair. It was as if every muscle was poised, ready for action and dangerous. It was as though he was the piece I had been missing my whole life which was strange. He was mesmerizing. But it was his eyes that locked me in place. There were Gray, storm gray. They weren’t dull, they were alive, shifting like clouds before a strike of lightning. They cut straight through me, stripping me bare without a word. And they were… scowling. As if ready

(Lyra)I woke up to the feeling of heaviness pressing down my chest. The night before had wrapped me in a blanket of sadness and I slept with a heart full of pain. Pain that wasn’t related to me any form.My dreams had been restless, filled with faceless whispers, fragments of shadows that slipped away whenever I tried to grasp them. I got up from the bed and blinked at the sunlight making its way through the windows and streaming directly onto my face. The warmth did little to chase away the darkness that crept onto my bones. The events of last night replayed in my mind over and over again like a cruel song I couldn’t turn off. The image of the silent and crowd in the moonlit courtyard, the carved memorial stone, and the way the Alpha had stood there like a man carved from stone himself. But it wasn’t his presence alone that haunted me.It was his eyes.Those storm-gray eyes that had met mine and for a moment stripped me bare of anything that I knew. I had felt it then, the same pul

(Kael)The sun was still at its peak when I left my study and headed for the training grounds. It burned away the remnants of last night’s memorial, scattering shadows across the courtyard as if the grief had no place under daylight. But grief does not obey the sun. It clings, it lingers, it sits heavy in the marrow of one’s bones.I had already walked around the courtyard twice that morning after my little meeting with the strange girl which my wolf recognized as our second chance mate. I spent the morning giving orders I barely remembered, nodding to the greetings of my pack members. The memorial had brought up everything I had tried to bury in my heart….the ache, the guilt, the empty place in my chest where my mate once lived.And then there was her.The girl who had looked at me with those wide, stormy eyes from the window last night. A stranger. A question mark. An unwanted reminder that fate still played games with me. I should have kept my distance, locked myself away again, bu

(Kael) I stood in a corner and watched as the training ground came alive. The sounds of fists hitting the flesh, bodies colliding and commands shouted into the cool morning air. My warriors moved like a single unit. They were sharp, disciplined, and relentless. But my attention wasn’t on them. It was on her. The strange girl. She stood there in the dirt, wobbling on legs that had no business being on a battlefield, facing ridicule she hadn’t earned but couldn’t avoid. Every mistake she made, every time she hit the ground, the laughter stung my ears more than I wanted to admit. I wanted to make them pay for laughing at her but I couldn't. I told myself that I was here to make sure that Leo didn't break her so soon and that she was being tested, nothing more. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the way she kept getting back up. Most wolves give up before the second fall. Pride makes them retreat, shame pushes them to the edges of the field where they hide their weakness. But n