All Chapters of The Alpha Betrayed Mate : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Chapter 2 Briar"Long enough," I said.My voice came out steady. I don't know how, because nothing else in me was steady — my pulse was hammering, my wolf was pacing hot and restless under my skin, and my hands wanted to shake badly enough that I pressed them flat against my thighs to stop it.I had spent three years in this house learning to keep my face smooth. Tonight, it was the only thing I had left.I pushed the kitchen door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. The smell of the room hit me all at once: warm butter, sugar from the tarts I'd spent the morning making, and underneath it, layered in a way that only another wolf would catch, the sharp copper edge of guilt. Dalton's guilt. His scent had changed the second the door opened, the way a wolf's always did when something primal in them understood they'd been caught doing something they couldn't explain away.Good. He should feel it.Lauren didn't flinch. She straightened slowly, smoothing the front of her green dress

Chapter 4 BriarHis truck was parked at the far edge of the gravel lot, away from the neat rows of parked vehicles lined up near the valet stand. Black, a little dusty, practical in a way that had nothing to prove. I climbed in before I could talk myself out of it.The leather seat was cool against the back of my thighs. Through the windshield, the Magnolia Room glittered gold and indifferent, two hundred wolves inside carrying on without me, my whole carefully constructed place in that pack already closing over like water over a stone.Asher got in, started the engine, and pulled out without asking me which direction to go.I didn't ask where we were headed. That probably should have concerned me more than it did."You're quiet," he said, after a few minutes of dark road and tree shadows sliding across the windshield."I'm thinking.""About him?""About all of it." I watched the city lights thin out as the road climbed, the trees thickening on either side until the headlights were t

Chapter 6 BriarI knew before I turned around that whoever had just pulled up that drive was not someone who made requests.That voice carried rank the way my Lauren’s did, not volume, not aggression, just the weight of a wolf who had never once in their life needed to repeat themselves. It pressed against my instincts the way dominant wolves always did, that involuntary pull toward deference that every wolf felt regardless of whether they wanted to.I turned around anyway.She was standing at the bottom of the porch steps, one hand resting on the open door of a dark car, the engine still ticking behind her. She was tall, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wearing a long coat that made her look like she'd come from somewhere important and left before the evening was finished. Her scent reached me a second after I saw her, cedar underneath it the same way Asher's was, but older, more settled, carrying the specific signature of a wolf who had held a serious rank for a long time.