Page 86 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

“You’re a lucky man,” she told me.

Was this luck?

Why did it feel more like a curse, then?

nikolai

HE SHOULDN’T HAVE spotted me, this Corentin person.

I’d been trained to be undetectable. Sure, I was a little out of practice, but I hadn’t been conspicuous at all. I’d stayed hidden, making my movements look random most of the time, but keeping him in sight.

I’d followed him down three streets now, and then I noted him looking at a car, and pointedly not getting into it, and that was when I knew he knew he was being followed.

Shit.

I had two options. I could show myself or I could give up.

If I kept tailing him, he’d probably find a way to lose me, I figured. If he was good enough to spot me, he was probably also good enough to lose me. Giving up or his shaking me off came to the same thing, that I wouldn’t know where he was.

So, I broke out into the open and stood in the middle of the sidewalk.

I waited several moments as he sauntered away.

And then he slowed. Stopped. Turned.

I thought maybe he’d come to me, but he didn’t. He folded his arms over his chest and stood there, waiting.

I approached. He was an attractive man, but then I’d never met an alpha I wasn’t attracted to, regardless of how they looked. I’d met old-man alphas in their late sixties with balding heads and paunches, and one whiff of their scent and something within me rose.

Still, I liked the look of him, his tattoos, his short hair, the way his upper lip curved into something like a sneer. He was… different.

No, not different, that wasn’t it.

He was the same as me.

Johannes and Dmitri, they were princes and they were nothing like me. This man, there was something about him, some sort of kinship, something that spoke to a shared history of struggle. He’d fought to get where he was and so had I. He’d been hurt. So had I. He was hard in a way that neither Dmitri nor Johannes was, hard in a way like I was hard.

I stopped two feet away from him. “I’m Nikolai,” he said.

“I know,” he said. The wind changed and I caught a whiff of his scent and it all slammed together in my brain. I’d scented this scent last night, in Johannes’s room, but I hadn’t noted it because I was all loopy after licking up their co-mingled come. Corentin had been there.

I licked my lips. “You’re good, aren’t you?”

“You people are just idiots,” he said. “No eye to security. Rich people always think they’re invincible.”

He wasn’t wrong. Maybe I’d gotten soft. I was usually on high alert in strange places, but in the castle, maybe I’d gotten too complacent.

Of course, this was always the way it was with danger.

It surprised you.

You tried and tried and tried to always be aware of it, but you never could be. It sneaked in when you were exhausted or happy or stupidly trusting. You couldn’t be safe, and I knew that.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“What do you want?” I said.

“Her,” he said. “Just her. She’s mine.”

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