The Alpha's Hidden Bond
It sharpened it, because the very thing that made me love her — that fierce, stubborn, self-erasing courage — was the thing keeping her hidden from me, and I couldn't hate her for it no matter how it burned.
It was Bram who first spoke the name, and he spoke it the way you'd name a sickness. We were three days back from another dead road, sitting in the cold blue light of the kitchen while my mother slept, and he said, low, "There's someone I haven't told you about. Because you'd have gone to her a year ago, half-mad as you were, and she'd have eaten you alive." He turned his cup in his rough hands. "They call her the Witch. Out past the eastern flats." I told him I had no time for stories a