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Home / Romance / RUNAWAY BRIDE: BOUND TO THE BIKER ALPHA / Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

All Chapters of RUNAWAY BRIDE: BOUND TO THE BIKER ALPHA: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

46 Chapters

31

Rhea's POV"Do you take your eggs scrambled or fried?"I sat up so fast I nearly knocked my head on the headboard.Kael stayed in the corridor holding a tray, completely serious, like this was something he did every morning. He had dark circles under his eyes and a small cut on his jaw I did not remember seeing before, and he was standing there asking me about eggs."What are you doing?" I said."Making breakfast." He walked in without waiting for an answer and set the tray on the nightstand. Scrambled eggs, toast, a cup of coffee still steaming. He pulled the chair from the corner of the room and sat in it, forearms on his knees, watching me the way with a strange look. I stared at the food. Then at him. "Kael.""Eat first.""No! You should talk first." I pushed the tray to the side and swung my legs off the bed, putting my feet flat on the floor. "What is happening? What was last night? Yeah! you cannot just serve me breakfast and expect me to sit here quietly like we are not in th

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Rhea's POV "Okay," I said, keeping my voice even despite the fact that my heart was beating fast. "Okay, baby. Look at me, just look at my face.""It hurts.""I know it does, but keep looking at me."I heard Kael move, crossing the room fast and dropping to one knee beside me. He did not ask or hesitate. He pressed his hand over the wound, both of his big hands wrapping around Jax's small arm, and then a shift occurred in the air.His alpha aura unfurled into the room slowly and deliberately like a blanket being pulled over something frightened.Jax stopped shaking.It happened in seconds. The boy's breathing slowed. His shoulders dropped from up around his ears. The wild, trapped-animal look left his eyes and he blinked, once and twice like a person coming out of a dark room into ordinary light."Better?" Kael asked quietly.Jax looked at him the way children do when they are deciding something important. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that is better."The bleeding was already slowing. Ka

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Rhea's POV"Find him."Kael said it without looking up from my phone screen. He had taken it from my hand thirty seconds ago and had not moved since, standing in the hallway outside Jax's room, studying the footage with the kind of stillness that was worse than shouting.I had seen Kael angry before. Loud angry, violent angry, cold angry. This was something below all of that. Something that did not have a name yet."Kael.""Find him." He handed the phone back to me and walked down the hall.I followed.It took eleven minutes to locate Marcus. He had come back. That was the thing that made no sense and then made terrible sense. He had driven out through the south gate at 3 AM with a body bag in the truck bed, and then he had come back and was sitting in the compound's small briefing room off the east corridor, boots up on the table, coffee in hand, like a man with nothing to hide.When we walked in, he looked at us both. Put his coffee down slowly. Lowered his boots to the floor."I fi

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Rhea's POV"Jax. Look at me right now."He blinked once and twice. The silver drained out of his eyes like water running from a glass, and then his knees buckled and he dropped straight down and I caught him before he hit the ground. He was burning. Not warm the way a sick child runs warm. Burning, skin so hot it hurt to hold him, like pressing your palms against something left too long in the sun."Mom," he said. His voice was wrecked, scraped raw. "I was looking at something.""What were you looking at?""I do not know." He sounded genuinely confused, not scared. That scared me more. "It was like a door. It was right there and I could almost see what was on the other side."I picked him up. He was five and small enough still that I could do it, and I held him against my chest and walked fast back toward the building, calling Kael's name before I was even through the door.Kael came out of the corridor on a run when he heard my voice. He took one look at Jax's face and went very stil

35

Rhea's POV "Nobody opens that door." I said it loud enough to carry down the corridor and two guards who had been reaching for the handle to Jax's room both stopped and stepped back. The howl had faded but what replaced it was worse. Silence with weight to it. The kind that pressed against the ears. Then the smoke appeared. It seeped under the gap at the bottom of Jax's door like something that knew exactly where it was going. Black and slow at first, almost lazy, and then it rose and gathered and pulled itself into a shape that made my stomach drop. The size of a wolf but wrong in every proportion. Legs too long. Head too low. The smoke that formed it kept moving even when the shape held still, churning inside itself like something alive and hungry trapped inside a form it did not quite fit. It circled the door. "What is that," one of the guards said behind me. "Back up," I said. "All of you. Back up now." Nobody argued. I heard boots retreating down the corridor and then Kae

36

Rhea's POV "She carved it into the concrete," Mara said. "With her fingernail. We do not know how." I pushed past her into the holding cell. The room was small and bare and the cot was still warm when I pressed my hand against it. On the far wall, level with where a standing person's eye line would be, cut deep into the concrete in clean deliberate strokes, were the words. *I am the Veil's key. You have the lock.* I stood there reading it three times. Then I stepped back and sat down on the cot because something was happening to my thinking, pieces moving and clicking and connecting in ways that made my chest feel tight. She had known. Not recently. Not since Marcus told her. She had always known. "Pull everything you have on her," I said to Mara. "Birth records, pack registry, bloodline documentation. Everything." Mara was already on her phone. I walked back to Kael in the corridor. He was reading the words over my shoulder from the doorway, jaw set, saying nothing. I looked

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Rhea's POV "Don't move. Nobody moves." Kael's voice cut through the dark, sharp and absolute. I heard the compound come alive around us, boots on floors, radio static, wolves shifting weight and reaching for weapons they could not use in a blackout without shooting each other. I stood still in Lyra's room with the letter in my hand and the child's breathing three feet away from me, steady and unbothered in a way that made my skin prickle. Outside the window the compound's exterior lights were gone too. Everything. All of it. Forty seconds of complete black. Then the power came back. The lights flickered once and held and I blinked against the sudden brightness and turned around to take stock of the room. Lyra's bed was empty. I spun toward the door. The corridor outside Jax's room, twenty feet down the hall, had its door standing wide open. I had closed it myself. I had checked the latch. I ran. Kael was right behind me, close enough that I felt the displacement of air when h

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Rhea's POV"Get him inside. Now. Move."I did not wait for anyone to agree. I got my shoulder under Rook's arm and took his weight and two of Kael's wolves appeared on his other side and we moved fast, back through the gate, the gravel crunching under our feet and Rook's boots dragging because he could not quite get his legs under him properly."I can walk," he said."You cannot," I said."I can mostly walk.""Rook. Stop talking and let us move you."He stopped arguing. That told me how bad it was more than the blood did.Vera was already in the medical room when we got there, like she had known, like she had been standing at that counter waiting for exactly this. She got him on the table and cut his shirt away and her face did the thing it did when she was doing calculations, still and focused and giving nothing away.Three gunshot wounds. She worked fast. I stood against the wall and watched the door and listened to the compound outside shifting into battle formation. Boots. Engines

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Rhea's POV "Tell me what is in him." Vera did not look up from Rook's arm. She had a needle in the vein at his elbow drawing blood, her movements quick and precise, and the colour of what came out was wrong. Too dark. Almost black at the edges. "Give me two minutes," she said. "Vera." "Two minutes, Rhea. Stand back and give me room." I stood back. It was the hardest thing I had done all night and the night had included a siege. I pressed myself against the wall of the medical room and watched Rook's chest rise and fall, shallow and too slow, his face completely blank, eyes closed now. Kael stood on the other side of the table with his arms crossed and said nothing, which was how I knew he was as frightened as I was. Vera held the vial of blood up to the light, and looked at it for a long moment. Then she set it down and turned around and her face told me before the words did. "Shade," she said. Kael uncrossed his arms. "What is that?" "A compound. Wolf-made, not human. Brew

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Rhea's POV"Who are you?"Kael said it the way he said everything when something had genuinely surprised him, flat and quiet and very still, like the question was a loaded thing he was setting down carefully.The silver-haired man looked at him for a moment. Then something moved in his face, not quite a smile, more like the recognition of something expected finally arriving."You have my eyes," he said. His accent was strange. Not foreign exactly, just old, like a way of speaking that had belonged to a place that no longer existed. "And your father's jaw. Though I only knew your father through two generations of distance." He tilted his head slightly. "You are Kael. I have been watching your line for a long time.""That did not answer the question," I said.He looked at me. His eyes were pale grey and completely clear, and the intelligence behind them was the kind that accumulated over centuries, not decades. It was like being looked at by something that had watched civilisations from

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