Page 3 of The Alpha's Forced Bride

Clancy sighed. “What about the raid last week?”

“That was a nightmare.”

“Was it?”

I hated second-guessing myself, let alone my best friend, but that was the nature of being possessed. We had to be willing to ask questions and get answers to those questions, too—even if we didn’t like the answers.

Clancy mulled over the question for a moment, turning his blackened eyes to the cabin. At this rate, it appeared as though he had taken a backseat to his body and was allowing his demon to peer through his eyes. But when he turned back to me, they were crystal green, an iridescent sea foam that felt brilliant and alert.

A smirk spread over his lips. “I suppose we don’t know, do we?”

“Don’t play mind games with me.”

“How do I know you’re not the one playing mind games?”

I sighed as I leaned toward the opened tome. While extending my hand to the parchment once more, I felt the air around us shift. The flames in the fireplace flickered. Winter hardened outside, repetitively beating on all sides of the cabin. To the east and then to the west, the wind gave no real preference for which way it whipped so long as it got to slam against something.

That something was my cabin and, by extension, my sanity.

My fingers drummed the book as I attempted to resist the annoyance growing in my body. “Demon overwhelm.”

Clancy adjusted his position, making the chair legs wheeze. “Same.”

“You think it’ll just… Stop sometimes.”

“And then it gets louder.”

Outside these walls, the world seemed like it was going haywire. The noise of the wind had tripled since I noticed it, turning my fingers into claws as I felt my irritation billow in my core. I couldn’t stop it either. That was the nature of the beast that had burrowed into my heart. I just had to grit my teeth through it.

A gentle hand touched my forearm. Within minutes, the racket of noise diminished, returning to its normal volume as it steadily slid around the cabin. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, trying to urge my heart to drum a regular beat. Clancy appeared through the muck. He carved through it with the scent of his wolf, a clary sage that reminded me of the days before we were cursed, of altars overflowing with coins, gifts, and incense.

The rhythmic sound of a drum thrummed at my ear, and then I realized he was cradling my head to his chest. I was sweating profusely, my eyes spinning wildly in my skull as I tried to figure out what the hell just happened.

“It’s alright,” he assured me, his voice a thunderous drone in my right ear. “You were just going through another bout of overwhelm.”

Overwhelm—that was the term we used to describe the side effects of a demon trying to claw its way to the surface. It was like our senses got overwhelmed with everything around us, as if the sound and the lights were turned up to eleven on an amplifier. Distortion made the overwhelm worse, and it typically was one of the things that drove a wolf right into a coffin.

Clancy knew well that I wasn’t the kind to succumb to my overwhelm. I hated when it happened, but I usually pushed through it. Tonight was worse than usual. I wasn’t sure why the strain was too much, and I didn’t like showing any kind of weakness in front of anyone. But Clancy understood.

If only I had a mate to understand me like this when things were going wrong through the night. Clancy could only do so much and could only sacrifice so much of his time to our pack and me. I couldn’t expect him to hang around forever in this capacity.

I breathed deeply as the sound of the wind died down. My mind settled and my soul felt like it was vibrating with irritation, but it was more manageable. I rubbed my palm against my chest in a wide circle.

Clancy smiled gently while mimicking the gesture. “From kitchens to this, am I right?”

“You always could make me smile.” I did one more circle for good measure. “I’m sorry.” I signaled my apology to him silently by way of my gesture, but I just wanted to be truly sure that he understood I meant it. “I’m really sorry I did this.”

“You didn’t do this.”

I scoffed. “Clancy, don’t. I’m the one who broke the deal and didn’t deliver the ammunition in time to Dubois.”

“That asshole was just waiting for an excuse to have us cursed by Mabel.”

“Yeah, and I should have seen her deceit from the start.”

The weight of my mistakes felt heavier than usual. That was probably my demon’s doing as well, but it was hard to tell at this point. So much of him—of it—was becoming a part of my everyday thinking and behavior. Ten years of captivity could do that to a man.

At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. I cast a look at Clancy that I had been giving him for the past few years, which reflected my inability to figure this curse out.

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