Filed To Story: Falling for the Alpha as a Surrogate Novel
I grin at her, glad she thinks it’s as cool as I do, and we both laugh with the pleasure of it.
When we’re both changed, I change Rafe into his own pajamas – he fusses a little, wanting to be left in peace, and I murmur my apology before tucking him in again and wheeling the little bassinet into the bedroom with us so that we can wait for Roger and Sinclair to come back.
“What do you think Xander’s planning?”
I ask, sitting down next to my sister on the new little loveseat that Sinclair and I put at the end of the bed. Considering that we use this room more than we thought we would to entertain our siblings, we needed more places to sit.
“I don’t know,”
Cora says thoughtfully, curling up on her side of the little couch and facing me. ”
Nothing good, obviously but…”
she turns her head to the side, considering.
“Well, if you were Xander, what would you do?”
“Go for Rafe?”
I posit, glancing down at my peacefully sleeping baby.
“Nah,”
she says, shaking her head, clearly lost in thought.
“I mean, yesterday Sinclair made a very definite move in marking Rafe as his heir. It kind of makes that option null to Xander.”
“What do you mean?”
I ask, frowning.
“Well,”
she says, looking at me evenly,
“even if he were to…take out Sinclair,”
she says slowly, and I my eyes go wide even at the hypothetical thought. She moves on quickly.
“Either way,”
Cora continues,
“Rafe is already Sinclair’s heir to his throne. There’s no way for Xander to really claim Rafe as his own now as part of Xavier’s line. Rafe’s thoroughly a Sinclair, just like us. If Rafe inherits, the people who would be his obvious guardians would be you, and Henry, and Roger.”
“And you,”
I say, reaching out a foot to nudge her on the knee, insisting she include herself.
She waves a hand at me, dismissing the idea, but I grin and nudge her again, letting her know that she’s in this whether she likes it or not.
But still, I take her point.
“So,”
I say softly,
“you think he’s doing something else?”
“I do,”
she says softly, her eyes un- focusing a little as she accesses the strategic part of her mind.
“I think that while Xander hasn’t made it easy, the Sinclairs have successfully countered every move that he’s made. We’ve got him on the run, and now he’s embarrassed himself in front of everyone at a public event.”
I nod, understanding that Xander really has been worked into a corner. He’s got very few resources left, and if he’s realizing as we perhaps have that the Atalaxians have brought him here less as an important player and more as a pawn that they can use to spark a war?
Xander may be realizing that his time and power is running short.
So, he’s scrambling.
“So, what would he do?”
I wonder aloud, considering it.
“I think he’d…grasp at whatever straws are left to him,”
Cora says softly, clearly thinking it through as she speaks.
“He’d grab at whatever he thought was rightfully his, whatever he can hoard to make himself stronger.”
“But he’s lost his home here, and his rights – we’d have him arrested, if the Atalaxians weren’t claiming him.”
“So, what does he have left…”
Cora says on a sigh, looking up at the ceiling as she racks her brain.
And I think hard as well, considering all the things that Xander has lost. I mean, he was once in Roger’s position the Duke, the brother to a powerful King. And he lost all of that. He made an bold play to get it back – planning to get me pregnant and steal the child, using Rafe to retake the throne but… Cora’s right. We turned away his plan there. And then he lost his connection to the Dark Lord’s priests when Sinclair and Roger killed them all, and his home when we made him run from it, and his servants when… But suddenly, I go quite, quite pale.
“Cora…”
I breathe, my eyes going wide as I look up at her.
“What,”
she says, her breath starting to come quick as she realizes that I’ve figured something out. I shake my head.
“Jessica, and Sarah,”
I say, starting to panic myself.
I mean, we haven’t seen them for days as soon as I found out that Xander was here I told them and Sarah let me know, politely, that they wouldn’t be attending any of the events to which they were of course invited, but instead sticking to their little suite of rooms to avoid seeing him.
But me – of course, idiot me – threw it in Xander’s face that I knew them, that I helped them And – and it probably wouldn’t take much at all for him to have done a little searching, a little casual chatter with the staff to lean that a young woman and her sister, refugees, were staying here in the palace
“We have to tell Roger and Sinclair,”
Cora says, jumping to her feet immediately, striding for the closet so she can get her phone and call her mate But before she can get there, a scream splits the air outside.
My head whips towards the window, my mouth falling open.
Because that was high pitched, shrill – The sort of sound that would come from an eight-year-old girl
Ella
Cora spins to look at me, her eyes wide, and together we both run for the window. Cora gets there first, unhooking the latch and throwing the window open, bending out so that she can see. I lean out too, my eyes scanning the ground below.
My gaze locks, instantly, on the action.
A man one whose figure and face I’ve glared at too many times in the past few days – drags a small girl by the hand. He has his arm wrapped around the waist of a woman. She fights against him, but her movements are sluggish.
“He’s got them,”
I say, grim, and then I look to the side at my sister, determined.
“Tell Sinclair. Stay with the baby.”
Cora stares at me for a second and then her eyes go round with shock. ”
Ella,”
she says, reaching out for me, Ella, what -”
But I’ve already turned back to the window, and before I can even think about what I’m doing, I transform into my wolf and surge out.
I hear my sister scream my name behind me, but I’m already gone, leaping from my narrow window ledge to the next below us, and then another, steadily working my way down the palace wall as fast as I my paws can carry me. The majority of my concentration is on aiming my jumps and ensuring that I land in the right spot, my wolf’s instincts taking over, but a little part of my mind is suddenly grateful that my wolf is small and nimble.
Sinclair, with his gigantic wolf, would never be able to balance on these small ledges, and neither would Roger.
Instead, my smaller rose-gold wolf makes quick of the vertical surface of the palace wall and darts towards the ground. The girl screams again as my paws hit the flagstones of the courtyard and I’m already moving across them towards the man who drags the woman and the girl away.
As I bolt across the courtyard towards them, I see from my periphery that I am not the only one to respond – palace guards begin to converge, their guns raised, but they hesitate when they see that Xander will not make it easy for them to take aim on him without risking Sarah and Jessica.
And the guards hesitate further when my snarl rips through the air, a steady order that clearly says he’s mine.
The guards fall back just a little, probably thinking that their King isn’t going to like it very much that they let me take the lead. But my authority brooks no compromise: I mean it.
This is my fight, and I won’t let them take it from me. Xander spins when he hears my snarl, looking first above my head as if he was looking for a larger wolf. Then his eyes fall, meeting mine, and he has the gall to laugh.
“A she-wolf?”
he says, his voice thick with derision. Xander yanks Jessica closer to him and Sarah struggles anew, though her movements are slow. I focus on her for a moment, noticing blood on her forehead, in her hair, and realizing that Xander has hurt her – somehow – to make this escape possible.
Xander holds fast to both of them, and despite their struggles and his older age, he’s still a wolf. He is stronger, innately, and his determination to take what is his is steel.
I growl again, prowling closer, my demand that he let them go is clear in my narrowed wolf’s eyes, my bared fangs. Xander just scoffs at me, beginning to turn away.
“You cannot touch me, she- wolf,”
he snarls.
“I will rip you to shreds.”
A louder snarl tears from between my teeth, letting Xander know that that’s precisely what I intend to do to him.
He spins again to me and then, vicious, he hurls Sarah to the ground and kicks her hard in the ribs. I hear bone crack and she moans, curling up, shuddering on the ground. I yelp, moving towards her, knowing that she’s badly hurt – But before I can take more than a step, Xander pulls Jessica hard against him and pulls a knife from his pocket, pressing it to her throat.
“A step closer,”
he growls,
“and I will kill her, she-wolf. You can keep the old one – I have no more use for her. But this one?”
he says, looking down at Jessica and running a lecherous hand down her cheek,
“I had her bred special for me, just to my tastes. And I will take her.”
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?