Page 2 of Claimed By the Alpha Wolves

“You shouldn’t have run,” he says, and the sound of his voice makes a shiver run down my spine.

The cool air whips around my legs, the soft growling of the other wolves like a chorus around me. We all know what’s coming.The wolves are going to enjoy this little show of ours, while I’m sure I’ll replay every moment of this night for the rest of my life.

“Well.” I laugh, despite the adrenaline coursing through my body. I’m still speaking to the ground. “To be fair, I ran because someone was chasing me.”

Charles moves forward and I jerk back on instinct, but he gets a hand on my arm before I can step out of his reach. A jolt goes through my body at the contact, and there’s a deep instinctwithin me to whimper and cower. Power like his can be felt by everyone, but most of all omegas.

“Let’s go, Faye,” he says, his hand tightening around my bicep until I look at him. It’s painful, but I wouldn’t dare pull my arm away. It’s like his gaze alone has paralyzed me into compliance. The two parts of me are at war: part of me wants to keep running, to ignore his directives, and the other part knows it’s not within my nature. “Don’t make a scene.”

“Please,” I say, my voice coming out light and breathy. “Just—you don’t have to tell anyone I’m even here! They would never know. I don’t come to the village. I’m not around other wolves, I’m just out here alone in the woods. No one would know and no one would care.”

He just shakes his head, looking bewildered. “Why are you this opposed to having alphas?”

I don’t know how to explain myself, but having alphas as my mates has unlocked a soul-deep fear from within me. Not only have I seen the cruelty an alpha is capable of first-hand when my brother was murdered by one, but I’ve also seen how little alphas care about us omegas. Like we’re walking uteruses whose only purpose is to reproduce. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it took the deaths of everyone I love to make me realize that being connected to other wolves is nothing but scary and painful. I just want to spend the remainder of my days alone.

Can’t anyone understand that? Can’t they just accept it?

“I’ll stay at my cabin. I won’t cause any trouble,” I tell him, trying to sound convincing.

“It’s not safe.”

My voice grows more frantic. “I’m perfectly safe. With the distance between me and any alphas or betas no one will be drawn to me. I swear.”

His voice dips a bit lower and softer. “Even if you could manage to convince someone that it’s safe, it’s certainly not regulation.”

“Sometimes the rules don’t have to be followed,” I say, resisting the urge to yank away from his touch. He still has his hand around my bicep, a light threat to how easily he could overpower me.

Charles shakes his head. “Not when I’m involved.” He sighs. “Already I made a mistake allowing you to stay out here too long and wallow, away from the connection to our pack, all because of that… disagreement with Pack Obsidian. Not that your parents and grandparent’s deaths helped with your behavior, of course.”

Disagreement? The word echoes through my mind, stinging like an angry jellyfish each time it repeats. An alpha’s son murdered my brother in cold blood just because he came across him on our lands and felt like killing him in front of his friends. He was laughing while he did it, while ending his life in cold blood just because as a strong alpha, he could. That’s it. He killed the only person I loved… because he could. And no one did fuck-all about it because “only an omega” saw his murder. That’s not a disagreement.

He continues, his tone factual. “But it’s been four years since Miles’ death–”

“Three,” I correct him, my stomach twisting.

“And several since your grandparents died–”

I try not to remember the one and only vacation my grandparents took, which ended in a semi-truck rolling over their tiny car. “Five years,” I clarify, trying not to flinch.

“And you were, what, eight when your parents were killed?”

“Six,” I say, like my age really makes a difference.

His words seem to have caught up with him. His gaze finds mine and gentles, if only by a little. “That’s a lot of loss. I understand that.”

My parents’ deaths were the easiest to swallow. I barely have any memories of them before an angry alpha, leader of a powerful pack, started a fight that ended in them being killed. I was sixteen when my grandparents died, and remembered that clearly, but we were never close. I was their burden, and they were the only people willing to raise me and Miles. But Miles was different. His death was violent, right before my eyes, inflicted by a psychopath who changed my view on the world.

His death… I will never recover from it.

“Do you… understand how I feel?” I ask, my voice small, turning his words on him.

For once, an alpha looks away from me. “It doesn’t change biology. Soon you’ll go into heat and you’ll need a male, whether you like that fact or not.”

“I can handle going into heat on my own,” I say, trying to sound strong, but knowing I don’t.

“You can’t,” he tells me kindly.

I shake my head.

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