Bound to the Alpha's Heir

1. BLOOD ON THE DECK

Chapter one

BLOOD ON THE DECK

LEON

The storm has me again.

I am five years old and the yacht is screaming, the deck pitching under my bare feet, and all I wanted was orange juice.

That is the detail my body never lets me forget.

I had padded down toward the galley in the dark and found men in black where the cook should have been.

A hand closes over my mouth before I can scream.

Cold air, colder water, the rail rushing up.

Then the sea takes me, and it takes everything: my name, my mother's face, the years, all of it dragged down into the dark where I cannot follow.

I wake with my claws half out and the deck chair splintering under my fingers.

Not a bed. Not the carved ceiling I expected. I have fallen asleep on the terrace of my own estate with a blanket someone laid over me and three days of grief pressing on my chest, and the first thing my eyes find is the drone.

It hovers past the balustrade at the height of a man's head, small and patient, its lens turning to hold me.

Behind it, two more. They have been out there since the news broke, hanging over the water in shifts, and the wolf in me does exactly what the wolf always does when something watches me while I am not in control of my own face.

It comes up.

I feel my hands go wrong. I feel the shape of my jaw start its argument, that terrible pulling under the skin, and the lens is right there recording a prince of two houses coming apart on his own terrace the night before he buries his mother.

I turn my back. It is all I have time to do.

I turn my back and I count and I shove twenty years of practice down on top of the thing trying to get out, and I do not know how much of the half second before I turned is already halfway to a server somewhere.

Queen Mother Emilia is dead. Emilia. My mother, whatever the papers call her, and tomorrow they will lower the woman who shielded my whole childhood into the ground while the entire court watches my face to see what I do with it.

Boots on the flagstones behind me. "Your Highness." Bruno, my head of security, who has never once used my name and never once needed to. He does not look at my hands. That is a kindness I will remember. "The garden. Now, if you would."

He walks me off the terrace and into the hedges, where the drones cannot follow the line of sight, and I let him, because the walls of my own house had started leaning in and the silence in this place is the worst kind, the kind that leaves room for grief to climb in beside me.

The garden smells of primrose and old stone, and for the first time since I landed I can breathe.

I walk past the box hedges, past the dry fountain, into the dark where no cameras wait and no one says her name in that careful, lowered way.

Out here I am not Leon the Lionhearted, not a borrowed prince, not a verdict the court is still deciding.

Out here I am just a man outwalking a bad dream.

That is when the wind shifts and the scent hits me like a fist to the sternum.

Smoke. Warm smoke, the kind that rises off banked coals at the bottom of the night.

Sun-baked stone. Ash that has lain undisturbed since before anything walked here to name it.

And under all of it something old, older than the palace, older than the language they crowned my uncle in, something that makes the animal in me go absolutely, perfectly still.

My wolf comes awake all at once, electric.

No. I plant my feet. I know this feeling from the wrong side, the surge, the claws pushing at the beds of my fingernails, the animal reaching for the wheel, and I have spent twenty years learning to shove it back down.

I count. I breathe. I reach for the careful little cage I keep him in.

Not tonight. Not here. Not the one night I cannot afford to come apart.

He does not fight me the way he fights the fear.

That is what stops me cold. He is not clawing toward violence.

He has gone still the way a predator stills when it understands, all at once, that it is not the largest thing in the dark, that something older and hotter is standing very close, and has been watching him the whole time.

And he is straining toward it anyway, baring his throat, and the want pouring off him is not hunger.

It is recognition. I have never in my life wanted to run toward a thing and surrender to it in the same breath, and the contradiction nearly drops me where I stand.

I turn before I decide to.

A woman steps out of the shadow of the hedge.

Not discovered there. Choosing the moment, the way you step into a room you have already decided to own.

Tall, composed in a way that reads as armor.

Hair the color of red gold, of fire caught and held still.

A gown the deep red of embers under ash.

Her eyes find mine across the dark and the garden tilts, the way a deck tilts, and for one second the dream and the waking world fold together before they tear apart again.

She looks at me the way you look at something you have already decided not to want.

"You're soaked," she says, and it is not an observation. It is a door closing, a deflection chosen on purpose, something to set between us in the half second before I can speak.

It does not work. Two words in and the pull is already a physical thing, a line drawn taut behind my breastbone.

"Do I know you?" My voice comes out rough. The famous voice, the one they pay millions for, gone to gravel.

Something crosses her face, grief or hunger or both, and she folds it away with a discipline that visibly costs her. Then, quieter, like a prayer she gave up saying years ago: "It's you."

My wolf surges so hard my spine bows. I lock my knees to keep from shifting on the spot, on hallowed ground, in front of a stranger, the night before I bury the woman who raised me, and somewhere under the panic the single word rises with no language and no permission and no way at all to stop it.

Mine.

The heat coming off her answers it. Not warmth.

Heat, banked and enormous, the sense of standing too near a forge with the door shut.

Whatever she is, she is not prey, and she is not safe, and every instinct I have spent two decades training tells me to put distance between us. I do not move an inch.

Behind me, gravel crunches. Boots, several pairs, moving with purpose. Her gaze flicks past my shoulder and the armor comes back up over her face in a single smooth motion, like a shutter dropping.

"You should go inside, Your Highness." The title in her mouth is the only thing that has hurt all night.

I do not move. Every step she takes back toward the dark drags at the line behind my ribs. "Wait. Your name."

But the guards reach me then, four of them, dropping into bows so deep the garden looks like it is folding in on itself. "Your Highness. King Ferdinand requests you. It isn't safe out here tonight."

When I look back, the hedge is empty. No footprint, no warmth left behind, only the scent already thinning on the wind, smoke and ember and that ancient third thing my wolf has decided, without consulting me, it will follow to the end of the world.

I let them lead them me in.

I am already counting the hours until I can find her again.

Dearest Readers,

Did you feel the ground move? Because Leon certainly did.

Our Lionhearted prince came home to bury the woman who raised him and say goodbye to the past ,and the universe, with its impeccable sense of timing, chose that exact garden to hand him his future.

So tell me, loves: who is she? What is a creature of fire doing in a fairy queen's garden, and why did "it's you" sound like something she has been dreading far longer than she has been hoping? Make your guess. Then turn the page.

Your author.