The Alpha's Cursed Mate

Prologue

I never knew real pain or fear until this night. Sadness has been in abundance; I've had far too much following the death of my father and brother. Tears spill from my cheeks like a perpetual rainstorm whenever I think of their murders — it has only been a week since they were taken from this world and into the next — but I didn't throb. My body didn't thrum with terror and my skin didn't ignite. Sobs lept from my lungs, but screams didn't tear through my throat, not as they have for earlier hours on end.

Logically, it didn't take hours; however, no sense of time existed while he breathed this air. My senses were transported, and I was as vulnerable as a deer in a mountain lion's hunt. He walked the plane of my world, yet I was convinced that I had been dragged into his.

My restless hands caress my throat as the warm bath water fails to soothe me. My voice has been tattered, my limbs run limp, and even my mind is left in shambles. There is no part of me that he hasn't taken as payment, even the ambiguous parts like my virtue which has been shredded and knawed before my eyes. His phantom touch still lingers — bruises left by hands not of a human or beast born from a mother and nursed at a breast. He was never born, I think.

He has simply existed always; the God of Death.

Tabitha enters the washroom, the creaking wooden door like a chiming bell. I don't bother looking at her. She kneels at the side of my bath and plucks the washcloth from the tub's lip before soaking it and stroking my shoulder to comfort. "Are you upset with me?" She asks softly.

My lips refuse to open.

"I thought if you knew all that would happen, that you would be scared, and I didn't want you to be sacred. I knew you would have forced yourself to do it regardless."

I want to tell her: if I knew what it would cost, perhaps I wouldn't have! But I can't tell her that, not only because my mouth is in protest, but because it's probably not true. I'm all that's left of my father's Alpha bloodline, and although men hate to see a woman in charge, they have no other choice. My mother had two children, and she herself has been gone for years.

Six days I have been Alpha, and for four days I have been seventeen. Very rarely is an heir titled before the age of fifty.

"I understand if you are too startled to speak," Tabitha says. "Maybe it's best if I go."

She leaves the cloth in its original place and stands. She wears her sleeping clothes, surely able to rest while I will lay awake for hours somewhere deemed safe. I cannot bear to lay on my bed let alone be in my chambers — the apartment I've had since birth. The space no longer exists to me, and if I could, I would have it burned to ash.

"Please, wake me if you need me. You may feel sick when you look at my face, but I'll never leave you; I'll always be here."

My head shifts the opposite way to ensure that my sight is free of her. Once the creaking of the door tells me that she's left, I wipe my wet hands down my face and pray the tub grows deep enough to drown me.

Mother always told me not to meddle with witches and their witchcraft, but I wonder if she would allow it for the preservation of the pack. I wonder if she would allow me to ruin myself to save it.

I leave the bath and immediately envelope myself with a robe. Unsure of where to go, I lower against the tub and draw my knees to my chest. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't cry; I made it the second he drew back into the corners of the room and vanished in the shadows. An Alpha wouldn't dare shed a tear, but if I could, I would weep and yell until my eyes ran dry and my chest burst.

My old self would suffocate in her despair, but I can never be her again.

She no longer exists to me, replaced by someone born from fear and sacrifice, someone who chose the survival of the many rather than herself.

All I've ever known and felt and wanted is gone. And something crawls inside my skull where my nails will never reach — the memory of my deal-making and the still-looming debt I will never finish repaying.