Page 8 of Bound By My Alpha Mate

“We’re trying to help her,” Sebastian argued above the shouting.

There were too many hands on me. I thrashed, trying to get free, but I was surrounded. It overwhelmed me, feeling too much like I was being captured all over again. They said they were on my side, but they refused to let me go free. They tried pulling me down, incapacitating me. Someone had managed to take the knife away from me. I was helpless.

My beast roared within me. Instinct told me to transform, but the moment my body began to shift, consciousness ebbed away. I collapsed, enveloped in grasping hands.

Screaming jaws snapped all around me. I struggled against the pressure beating my body down. Claws dug into my fur, teeth were buried in my neck, and the stench of burning oil suffocated me. I couldn’t fight back against these things that were attacking me. They were ripping me apart— I could already feel it in my limbs, and my chest, and then in my brow, where my horn was wrenched from my skull.

A body crashed into the maelstrom around me—the monsters scattered in a cacophony of shrieks. Stunned, I watched the inky mass rise up larger than all else, but those weren’t yellow eyes piercing me—no. His gaze shimmered like the depths of a foreboding ocean. He looked at me as if he should be the one ripping me apart, not them.

I snarled but couldn’t move.

He snarled back. The last things I remembered in the dream were his teeth.

Chapter 6

Colt

I’d been following the dragons when I went down without warning.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw them piling onto something ahead of me. Disoriented, I watched the writhing mass tear apart the poor creature underneath them; I figured they had hunted something down while I was unconscious. But as I staggered to my feet, my surroundings revealed that I wasn’t in the same place where I had dropped. There were no trees here, only barren, black stone. The sky was a bleak and starless violet, the eternal dusk of a strange dream. The vicious swarm of dragons beckoned me, but it wasn’t the violence—it was the creature they had in their grip that pulled me forward. Whatever it was that they had, I wanted it to be mine.

I lunged at them, dispelling the throng with a roar unlike anything that had ever come out of me. I felt stronger than before. The dragons scrambled away, and I knew it was a dream because, in reality, they would have turned their fangs on me instead. Now, in the dream, I stood tall, my head raised and tail bristling, staring down at the creature I had rescued from the monsters. I recognized her instantly.

Her pale fur held the chromatic glimmer of twilight. Her horn gleamed even in the absence of the moon’s glow. She turned her light purple eyes up to me, and I bared my teeth, confused and hungry all at once. The hybrid. Now was my chance to get her. She recoiled defensively, but my body moved anyway, encroaching on her with the intent of grabbing her. Despite her mouthful of teeth and the horn she wielded at me, I pounced at her, and we descended into a skirmish, trying to dominate one another. She twisted and squirmed, kicking me away as I went for the back of her neck, until finally, the two of us were so intricately entangled with one another that I didn’t know where my body ended and hers began. We were a carpet of black and white fur, our tails ensnared, teeth lodged in each other’s skin, choking with pain and blistering satisfaction.

At some point in the dream, we lost sight of what we were supposed to be doing. Fighting each other, or touching each other? Breathing in each other’s scents? I wanted her so wholly and completely that it was impossible to unravel myself from her. I couldn’t get close enough to her, not unless…I were inside her.

That revelation jarred me awake. As a wolf, I coughed and sprawled, my body ejecting me until I had transformed back into a human and lay prone in the dirt. The trees towered over me, their canopies blocking out the early evening sun. Breathing hard, I rolled onto my stomach and propped myself up on my elbows, my back rising and falling in stricken exhalations. All around me, the forest remained still. The dragons were long gone.

Slowly, I rose to my knees, running my fingers through my hair. The intensity of the dream had left my body quaking. Heat coiled in my chest and my stomach. Parts of my body ached where I remembered she had bitten me, kicked me, and pushed me away in an attempt to escape. The dream—it had felt so real. The texture of her fur, her scent sweetly lupine and light as rose water. I yearned to experience her again, even as the meaning of the dream slowly began to set in. I had dreamed of her like that for a reason.

It was our Moondream. Defying all logic, Kiara Vale, the impossible, immaculate wolf-unicorn hybrid was my fated mate. And I was supposed to deliver her to my father for slaughter.

I was sure she’d hated it. And me…? I didn’t know how I felt about it. I still wanted to possess her, only my desire for her was a hundred times stronger now. It would kill me inside, either letting her go and saving her life or fulfilling my urges and capturing her. No matter how this ended, it wouldn’t end happily.

Even worse, I knew that if I did slaughter her, like my sister Catrina had done to her fated mate, Joseph Nym, I would be cursed never to have a fated mate again.

Fuck.

My body ached, but I had to catch up with the hunting party despite what had just happened. Bracing myself, I forced another transformation, agony firing through my limbs and under my skin. Still hot from the transformation I had undergone just minutes ago, my anatomy changed shape once again. By the time I was wolf, I struggled to stand, my veins pulsing and my ears ringing. Panting, I pushed myself into a jog, taking off after the Inkscales.

The rest of the evening, I dreaded possibly crossing Kiara’s scent. I didn’t want to confront the truth of our Moondream so quickly, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to capture her yet, either. I wanted to hunt her—alone. I wanted to find her and sink my teeth into her, yes, but I wanted so much more than that at the same time. It was a relief when the dragons and I came upon a spot just beyond the eastern borders that was rife with the stench of Mythguard humans and Kiara. We drew the conclusion that they had found her first. This meant that she would be far from here. Safe.

Safe from me, that is.

When we finally returned to the mine around three in the morning, I stayed silent as the dragons turned human and reported to Lothair about our findings. Lothair didn’t give me a second glance; no one else knew about the Moondream. He dismissed us, and I went back to my corner in the caverns to dwell on the situation. That was all I could do.

I was susceptible to obsessing. I always had been. I’d obsessed over Aislin when my older sister started dating Gavin Steele; I’d gotten it in my head that, once our packs merged, Aislin and I would make the perfect Beta couple. I’d had a plan and was convinced it would work smoothly. Aislin’s resistance just made me believe that I had to fight for perfection in order to make it work. I’d thought that if I were persistent, it would pay off. I just had to make her want me, had to be coy and desirable and unobtainable, because if I knew anything about Aislin, it was that she was ferocious in her pursuit of things she couldn’t have. She’d never taken the bait, though, which had only made me obsess even more.

I’d obsessed over Billie, too, but in a different way. My love for her had been complicated, both safe and unsafe. I’d been able to take refuge in her being a constant in my life, always somebody I could turn to in Hexen Manor because of how my father smothered her. It was wrong of me to take advantage of that, but I never did anything about it because I liked how she was always there for me, how I was the only one who treated her right, which made her appreciate me all the more. She was my adopted sister and not related by blood, so it was easier for me to be possessive of her, to fall back on her comfort whenever Aislin snubbed me. Before our lives imploded, I’d even thought she and I could have run away from Dalesbloom. I could have been everything she needed in a companion: a mentor, a protector, a source of love. How fucked up was that? I realized later that I had been manipulating her, taking advantage of how my father had robbed her of her independence. And when I’d heard that my father had sexually assaulted her, it had struck me how I was no better than him. I didn’t want that.

Obsession sabotaged my relationships. Aislin and Billie had been lucky they’d had Everett and Gavin to save them from me. But the night after receiving my Moondream, I feared that my obsessing would ruin my heart and mind all over again, exposing too much of me to somebody who didn’t care to reciprocate.

I wanted Kiara so badly. More than I’d ever wanted Aislin or Billie. And I was pretty sure that this desire was going to shatter my heart until it was irreparable.

By the time I woke the next morning, the only solution I could think of was to inform my father right away. Obliterate any chance of seeing this Moondream through. If I had to slaughter my fated mate to protect my heart, so be it. I would.

I approached my father in the room where he had the folding table with all his papers. A stack of densely shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes towered in the corner. There were guns buried in whatever filled those boxes, I knew.

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