Filed to story: The Cursed Alpha King's Destined Mate Book PDF Free
The wolves ran now, hunting. Out Alpha may address us by tomorrow morning if the Prince didn’t mount his head on a spike in front of the pack house before morning.
What were their moves? What would be ours?
I felt helpless here. Out of the loop. Rejected. An outcast. My traitor b***d kept me out when my pack built a shelter for themselves.
Celeste wouldn’t return and it made me half glad and half-sad. She would go into hiding with them after the run while I stayed out with the enforcers, the warriors, the Alpha and his Beta. Those tasked with protecting Redville would do their protecting while keeping the pack members safe. The only outcast – me – would be caught in the crossfire.
Minutes rolled into hours and when I couldn’t sleep, I got out of the flat lump I called a bed, going downstairs to the kitchen. I had to exhaust myself before I could sleep.
The kitchen was as I left it; with washing water and a pile of clean and another pile of dirty plates stacked inside. I went to washing the plates with my heart in my throat.
They didn’t allow me into the sanctuary. I couldn’t hide from the crossfire. I knew I couldn’t hide but my room in the basement felt safer than this kitchen on the ground floor with windows looking outside.
My heartstrings played a violet, ear splitting sound when I felt the chill in the atmosphere as a being so powerful, his very essence seemed to suffocate me, entered the pack house.
My hands in the dishwater shivered, disturbing the water and making bubbles rise from the water.
I gasped when he entered, lowering my head before I made the mistake of looking into the soulless black eyes the myth said he had.
“Is there food in this house?” His cool words reverberated with power. I nodded. He couldn’t be talking to anyone else but me. “Fix me something to eat.” I nodded, moving around the kitchen in haste to fix him something from the food we prepared for the final ceremony of the feast.
“Your pack is rude.” I didn’t dare look at him and I didn’t dare disagree so I nodded my head. “The last pack I visited had people to greet me at the borders – they called them sacrifices but it is the thoughts that count.” I nodded again as he spoke. The food on the plate in my hand danced around as I placed it before him.
“What is your name, omega?” I raised my head a fraction, making the mistake of raising my head to look in his eyes.
I gasped as pain seared me from the inside out. My bones began to crack as I fled the pack house.
Latency meant I couldn’t shift; I had a wolf trapped inside of me that wouldn’t come out no matter how much I tried. My kind shifted at eighteen, with Alpha wolves shifting earlier – at seventeen. I would be twenty in a few weeks which meant for two years, I bore the stigma of being a traitor’s daughter and that of a latent wolf. I couldn’t shift until that night.
Pain bloomed on every inch of my skin. Tiny pinpricks, sharp stabs. I felt them all at once as my body changed. The worst of them happened in my head, my skull. As if an external force pressed my skull together, I felt my head squeeze, my brain seemed to be crushed. It passed with excruciating slowness, my ears drums and eyes, nose, everything, changing all at once. If someone took a broken shard of glass and ran it into my eyeballs, they may not hurt as much as they did then.
I hit the ground face-first as I fell, my half-open mouth taking in sand and leaves. I hunched over but when the second wave came, it hit harder than the first, devastating me from head to toe and reawakening the ringing in my eardrums. Something cold trickled out of my ears, my eyes, and my mouth. It would be tears, sweat or snot. It could be b***d.
When I couldn’t feel anything but the stabbing in my stomach, the banging in my head and the fire on my skin, I let the pain take over me. It washed over me like a tide and then caught in one or two places, unable to record fully. My heart calmed after the panic of impending doom but my bones continued to ache.
I scrambled to stand, falling at least five times before I took a wobbly step forward, only to fall on my stomach again. Although I couldn’t remember what it felt like walking for the first time as a child, I knew it wasn’t much different from this. Albeit no one supported me or caught me when I fell. No one taught me to put one step ahead of the other making me stumble much more. I had no guidance, no one to celebrate a shift I prayed for two years, no one to ask the colour of my wolf or how it felt to shift. If I howled, no one would answer. If I cried, no one would care.
‘You’re choosing self-pity on our first shift? Seriously?’ Artemis didn’t sound the least impressed at my silent lament. ‘This is the happiest day of your life, second only to when we find our mate!’ She snapped at me while moving at a slow pace to avoid taking in a mouthful of dirt for the nth time.
“We already found our mate, remember?” I found my mate on my eighteenth birthday as most wolves do but unlike most wolves, I didn’t shift and my mate rejected me.
‘Lucien was never worthy of us. We will find someone else.’
If mates were so easy to find, people would not be scrounging the earth to find theirs. Many people died without the privilege of meeting their second half so what chances did I have of finding a second chance mate in one lifetime?
I spent the rest of the night exploring as a wolf, picking up scents that had gone unnoticed to my human nose and appreciating the beauty of the moon that washed over me and acted as a light to my path as I moved about the small woods close to the pack house.
By the time I’d explored the ground to my wolf’s content, by the time I’d successfully hunted a rabbit and made a mess, my wolf was ready to retire for the night. First shifts, I’d heard, were always the most difficult and it left the body weak for hours afterwards. Exhaustion already made my eyes droopy and my body felt like a large sack of rocks that my tired legs couldn’t hold up.
I shifted back to my human form without being conscious, my body unable to hold my other form for much longer. Shifting back was another exercise in extreme torture where my body turned from wolf to human, snapping bones and sending shards of sharp stabs into all my organs, kicking me in the head and stealing the breath from my lungs as I gasped and gasped ten times more.
At the end of my shift, I battled the problem of being n*ked. I wiped a tear from my eyes as I stared at the shreds of one of the few clothes I had, a simple blue dress that Celeste got me last year. My br*a and p*nties too had shredded up, my slippers missing some parts. Without the fur of a wolf, I grew cold quickly, standing stark n*ked in the woods on a cool night.
With a hand covering my bre*asts and the other covering my nether region, I dashed out of the woods at lightning speed, hoping and praying not to run into anyone. I hadn’t completed my prayer when I smacked into someone – the last person I wanted to see in a state of undress.
“Hey, watch -” The words died in Lucien’s throat as he put his hand on my shoulder, trying to scold me for running into him. I wrenched out of his hold with all my might, flying into the pack house and racing to my room in the basement, my skin hot all over and my eyes stinging.
He saw me n*ked!
I hurried into faded jeans and a big shirt as if putting on clothes at record speed would negate the effect of having intrusive eyes on me. I wished I could scrub the look in his eyes from my memory. I wish I could wash off the sense of exposure, of being bared – I wanted to scrub it all off but I couldn’t so I settled for dressing in the blink of an eye and huddling beneath the covers of my bed.
Every bone, tissue and cell in me jammed, freezing when my new, heightened senses picked up his scent. Without meaning to, my body began to shake as if I’d been submerged in snow and pulled out to be sprayed with ice water.
“Hey.” I felt his weight on my bed, sinking the already flat bed. I closed my eyes, wishing he wouldn’t do this, wishing he would avoid me the way I wanted him to avoid me but he didn’t. Instead, he placed a hand on my shoulder. I jerked away from it, still hiding underneath my covers. He’d seen me exposed. I didn’t think I could face him anytime soon but he’d come seeking me out, knowing I would be embarrassed.
Where were his friends? When would the jeer start? Had he taken a picture? No, he couldn’t have but the impossible became possible with Lucien.
“You shifted. Congrats.” I still didn’t answer him. I couldn’t even pretend to be asleep as my body vibrated violently against the bed. It was because of him. He couldn’t pretend not to know that his presence made me uncomfortable but I guess he didn’t care about that.
After a long silence with me wishing he would leave, he pulled off the cover from my head, exposing me.
“Are you still afraid of me?” He asked, his eyes on my ch3st. Even dressed, he still looked at me as if he could see my n*ked body. I looked at my shirt to be sure it didn’t have a hole in it. ” You grew up.” He swallowed. I frowned at the thickness of his words and the weird look in his eyes.