The Forbidden Alpha (Forbidden #1)

Prologue

I hate her. I fucking hate her.

There was no time, yet I ran.

My breath tore in and out in ragged bursts, my chest threatened to cave in on itself, my legs were driven by something beyond thought or will. The stairs stretched—cruel, endless, multiplying with every step. My thighs burned, lungs screamed. I ran anyway.

The heavy oak door, reinforced with iron, refused to budge when I threw myself against it.

Please, please, please.

The word was a prayer, holding everything I had to give. I pressed my forehead to the wood for one breath, two, then I backed up three steps and drove my shoulder into it. Pain cracked through my arm like lightning and I bit down on the cry that rose in my throat.

Hatred for her burned, yet I implored the Goddess and tried again.

Inhaled through the nose. Backed up. Exhaled. Sprinted.

This time, the door gave. I stumbled out, my feet skidding on the wet grass as the cold air was a shock to my chest.

A wolfsbane grenade. Light detonated in my eyes—white and absolute. My vision dissolved into shapeless brightness and I squinted hard, waiting for the world to reassemble itself around me. Slowly, forms bled into focus.

Then the sound hit me all at once.

The screaming and crying.

The wet percussion of bodies clashing. The battle had already swallowed the grounds whole—the fallen littering the ground, the living climbing over them.

I kept my eyes up and moved through it, reaching out as I passed—a hand on a shoulder, fingers brushing an arm—searching for recognition, the pulse of a bond, anything.

None answered.

I refused to think about what that meant.

Find him first. Then search for the others.

I lifted my nose and tried to cut through the chaos—but the poison persisted through my system, my senses dulled by the drug. The scents blurred together into something useless and I stumbled forward, catching myself on my palms before I rose again.

That’s when color dragged my attention.

Dirty blond, familiar, even matted and dark with blood. His laugh, the scent of the salty sea. The only person who had never needed anything from me lay in the grass.

Gabriel.

His beautiful hair clumped with congealed blood, his face turned toward me like he’d also been searching for someone at the end. My hands trembled as I reached for him.

My wolf pressed against the inside of my ribs. Later, she promised. There will be time to mourn him after. I laid Gabriel down with shaking hands. I smoothed the hair back from his face. It was the only tenderness I had left to give him.

Then I moved.

The visions had been clear. There was yet time to change the outcome. He had believed that—had believed in me when I’d had no reason to believe in myself. I owed him the attempt.

Movement shifted in my periphery. A pile of limbs near the edge of the clearing rose and fell with new breath, and something pushed up through the bodies—slow, deliberate, enormous. My lungs seized before he even breached the surface.

Dark hair appeared first.

The relief that cracked through my ribcage was almost painful. He rose like a storm breaking, and tears burned down my face as my mate came into view.

He stood upright, breathing, and towered over the carnage around him as if the heavens moved with him.

His eyes found mine.

The same relief lived in them, raw and unguarded, and for one moment—one single suspended moment—everything else ceased to exist. My fingers twitched to touch him. Every feeling I’d pressed down for months rose at once, flooding my throat: My rock. My love. My home. He’d come.

He took a step toward me.

And then stopped.

The color drained from his face. His jaw fell open. His gaze—those eyes that had just held mine with such certainty—went wide with something I had never seen in them before.

Fear.

My gaze dropped. A hand. Outstretched. Steady. Pulsing with the rhythm of the heart it had ripped from his ribs.

My mouth fell open. My soul made a sound it had no voice for.

The mate bond didn’t break slowly—it snapped, a sound I felt in every nerve I had, and I was on the floor before I understood I’d fallen.

Wet grass seeped into my clothes. The sound around me morphed, like voices heard underwater.

I stared, unable to look away—even as my own life drained out through the wound where he used to live inside me.

Footsteps approached.

A shadow fell over me.

There was a thud at my side and then a hand closed in my hair, wrenching me back. I stared into my mate’s face one last time, his expression slack, his chest a ruin, before my head met a hard rock.

And then: nothing.