Page 1 of The Alpha's Silent Mate

1

The cold penetrates so deep into my fur that shivers shake my body, and I know I’ll never get warm again. But the will to fight, the strength to pull myself free, evaporated long ago. Now I just wait for death.

It never comes.

Suddenly it’s no longer day, but night. The cold remains because it touches my soul.

A man’s vicious swear cuts clean through the silence, and a small whimper slips free before I can stop it. Voices can only mean one thing: He’s here. He found me.

When footsteps move toward me, my heart beats in time to each heavy tread, the last beat harder than the first.

I try not to breathe.

If you don’t move, he will leave.

The weight pinning me to the ground is ripped away and I swallow a scream, already flinching before I realize it isn’t him. It’s someone I’ve never seen before—but that doesn’t mean I don’t know who he is.

Orwhathe is.

A bond snaps into place. An unbreakable one.

Mate.

A naked man with shoulder-length, white-blond hair and a blue-green stare gazes down at me, his eyes widening with the same realization. He stretches a hand toward me, and panic gives me the motivation I was missing before.

Staggering to my feet, I back away but lack the energy to go far.

A step.

That’s all I can manage, and even then, it takes everything I have. My muscles tremble and I sink back to the wet ground, panting with exhaustion.

The man draws his hand back with a gentle smile before sinking into a crouch so close to me that I know I’ll never relax. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”

It’s a lie.

The last man smiled as he said it. Now my pack is gone. Everyone but me.

“Shay!”

I don’t look away from the man with powerful shoulders and the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.

He doesn’t rise from his crouch, and he doesn’t move away. All he does is angle his head a little to the side, in the direction the shout came from. “What?”

The same man shouts back. “We have a live one. He—"

I know it can’t be my pack. I know it can’t be my family, because I’m wearing their blood on my fur.

“Find out what you can, and kill him,” Shay interrupts.

After his last words, he seems to no longer care. His eyes refocus on mine. “Can you shift, pup?”

He’ll never learn that I’m no pup, because I’ll stay a wolf until I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be a human girl. Or he kills me. Just because he’s my mate, it doesn’t mean I can trust him.

His eyes soften. “That’s okay. You must be cold.”

A red-haired man, just as naked as Shay, approaches before he jerks to a stop, his face twisted in horror. “Fuck, she’s covered in—”

Shay’s smile doesn’t shift. “Get me a blanket. Use language like that around her again and I’ll cut out your tongue. Go.Now.”

---