Todos os capítulos de The Alpha's Runaway Mate: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

The word rang through me like a bell struck once, and then everything after it happened too fast.My knees went weak. I put a hand on the wall behind me, because for the first time in my life, I felt full. Something that had been empty in my chest for twenty-two years was suddenly there, warm and alive and shaking.I looked at him across the hall.Alpha Adrian Black stood near the front, greeting our Alpha with a short bow of his head. He had not looked at me. He had not looked anywhere near me. But my wolf did not care about that. She pushed against my ribs like she wanted to run straight through the crowd.Mate. Mate. Mate.I pressed my hand flat against my chest and made myself breathe.Around me, the room had gone back to its noise. Nobody else had felt what I felt. Nobody else's world had just cracked open. The girls near me were still whispering about his shoulders and his eyes, the way they whisper about any handsome stranger. To them, he was simply the Alpha of Black River.To

I walked until my legs forgot how to do anything else.The moon was high by the time I reached the edge of pack territory, the place where our land gave way to the tangled forest that belonged to no one. I had never gone this far alone before. Wolves did not travel these woods at night without a reason, and I had never had one.Now I had every reason in the world.My bag was light on my shoulder. A change of clothes, my mother's dress folded carefully at the bottom, my notebook, and what little money I had saved from small chores over the years. It was not much. It would have to be enough.Behind me was a house full of people who had just watched me lose everything and felt nothing about it. Ahead of me was nothing I could name.I kept walking anyway.The forest at night sounded different than it did in daylight. Every snap of a branch made my heart jump. Every shift in the wind carried a hundred unfamiliar scents, and without a working sense of smell to tell me what was safe and what

The shop took longer to open than I expected.I had thought, in those first hopeful days, that scrubbing the floors and fixing the door would be the hard part. I was wrong. The hard part was money. Every board I needed to repair the counter cost more than I had budgeted. Every roll of cloth I wanted to stock ate further into the small pile of coins I had left from Millbrook and my mother's dress sold at the back of my mind as a thing I refused to do, no matter how thin my savings grew.I worked the bakery in the mornings before the sun was fully up, my hands deep in flour, and spent every afternoon on Pine Street with sleeves rolled to my elbows. By evening I was too tired to do anything but fall onto the thin mattress above the bakery and sleep without dreaming, which I was grateful for. Dreams, in those weeks, only ever led back to a great hall and seven words I was trying very hard to forget.The bird-shaped water stain on the ceiling never fully came out, no matter how many times

I did not throw the card away.I told myself I kept it because it was useful information, a name and a number in case the man came back, but the truth was simpler and less comfortable than that. I kept it because something about the visit had unsettled me in a way I could not fully explain, and I did not want to lose the only piece of it I could hold in my hand.The name on the card read Marcus Hale, with a line beneath it that said Hale Holdings, and nothing else. No address. No hint of what interests further north might mean, or why a man like that would travel all the way to Millbrook for a shop that sold ribbon and dried flowers and small handmade gifts.I did not mention the visit to Daniel when he came by that Thursday. I am not sure why. Perhaps I did not want to see his easy confidence falter, even for a moment, over something I could not yet explain to myself.The summer wore on, warm and full, and Rose Haven kept growing in small, steady ways that felt like they belonged to

Adrian Black had not thought about the girl from Silver Moon Pack in months. Or that is what he told himself, most days, when her face rose unbidden in his mind during some quiet hour he could not account for.He had told himself many things since that night in the great hall. That he had done what an Alpha must do, protecting his pack from an uncertain bond. That the strange, hollow feeling that had settled into his chest afterward was simply the ordinary weight of leadership, nothing more. That the way his wolf had gone restless and sharp-tempered in the weeks since, snapping at pack members who had done nothing to deserve it, had nothing to do with a rejection he had chosen freely and would choose again.He believed none of it, not fully, but a man can carry an unconvincing lie a very long way if he is stubborn enough, and Adrian Black had always been stubborn.The rumor reached him through Corwin, his beta, a broad, steady man who had served the Black River Pack since before Adria