Page 32 of Ruled By The Alpha

He jumped higher.

His fingers came away with only air.

Enraged, he roared once more.

With a gasp, his quarry rose higher—until her head and spine neared the ceiling. As if her body was going to float right through the cave rock itself.

“No!” He could not allow that.

“W-what is happening?” Her small arms flailed, her legs too.

He froze. Her tone… he didn’t like it. It was high-pitched and trembly, as if she was in pain—and yet he could see nothing hurting her, which meant the feeling came from inside.

He’d liked her purr much better, a sensual, husky vibration that had stroked his skin and made him feel a hundred feet tall.Thatwas a better sound.

The frightened noises she made now disturbed him.

As did her impending escape.

“Come.” He snapped a hand downward. He had never lost a quarry before.

As if she intended to obey, her body dipped—only to snap back up, rising even higher. Her head smacked the ceiling. “Ouch.”

His chest went tight. He liked that sound of pain even less.

He wasn’t sure why. He usually liked the strangled howls of agony that issued from his prey.

But as the distance between them grew and the scent of her in his lungs lessened, the haze of rut cleared from his brain. Thinking became possible. More so than it had ever been in his lifetime, his synapses firing in all directions, as if a latent part of his brain had only been waiting for her touch to wake up.

He used this new-found skill to consider her behavior.

It dawned on him that she was not in control. Not escaping on purpose.

Her body hit the domed rock once more, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, her body flipping. Tiny claws sunk into the crevices of rock as she looked over her shoulder and down, her eyes screwing up tight. “So high. I-I am going to fall.”

A new instinct took hold.

“No.” He sprinted to the wall. Digging in his claws, he used the rocks to propel himself upward, every muscle straining.

He had never moved so fast in his life. The icy sensation that crept up his spine was also one he hadn’t experienced before. Not even when the mammoth’s tusk had sliced through his hip and he’d thought he might not be fast enough to sink his fangs into its soft underbelly, or the time he’d fought a pack of xxarmons and lost so much blood he’d slept for more than a handful of rotations.

Pain and rage and hate he knew. But this… this feeling was something else.

She could not be allowed to fall. The memory of her soft sighs, the taste of her on his tongue, the sensations pumping through him when he touched her were all new and different—and he wanted them again.

The snap of her bones, the gush of her blood… that could not be allowed to happen.

The organ inside his chest squeezed tight, his throat equally clogged. Two strange sensations, unpleasant and utterly foreign.

He reached the top of the wall. “Come.” Sinking his claws deep into the rock bed to steady himself, he reached out a hand. And was nowhere near close enough to grab her.

“No.” Her voice shook. She floated farther out of reach, bouncing toward the middle of the room. “S-Stay back.”

He snarled. Considered his options.

He did not like this word ‘no.’ He would touch her. Lick her. Scent her. There was not a part of her he would not claim. But none of that would be possible if she dropped and her soft parts splattered on the ground.

She was not like his kind. She was small. Fragile. Lacking the same hard infrastructure and tough hide that made him hard to kill.

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