The Alpha Who Was Never Meant to Love Me

"Your Highness."

The title landed absurdly on a girl in a torn dress with mud on her shoes and ash in her hair. I looked down at myself and then at the old man kneeling in front of half the pack, waiting for someone to laugh, for the whole thing to reveal itself as some cruel extension of the night's humiliation.

No one laughed.

"I think you've mistaken me for someone else."

"We haven't," he said, and didn't move, his knee pressed into the scorched dirt like he intended to stay there until I accepted what he was offering.

I searched for Adrian. He stood several steps away, unreadable in a way that felt deliberate, the same careful blankness he'd worn on the ceremony stage before he'd broken my heart in front of everyone I'd ever known.

"You knew about this," I said.

"I suspected."

"You suspected I was connected to some lost bloodline, and you still stood on that stage and rejected me in front of everyone?"

"I was ordered to."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you here." His eyes flicked, briefly, to the hundred sets of ears around us, warriors and elders and children pulled from their beds, all of them pretending not to be listening while they listened to every word.

Seraphina's laugh cut through the tension, soft and amused, from somewhere near the Council. "Still protecting her?"

"Go back to the hall," Adrian said.

"You don't command me anymore." Warriors shifted closer on both sides - his, and, I realized with a cold drop in my stomach, hers, the courtyard quietly dividing itself into two camps that hadn't existed an hour before. Seraphina looked at me, something almost pleading underneath the venom. "Ask Adrian what his family did to yours."

The courtyard went very quiet, quiet enough that I could hear the fires still crackling somewhere behind the hall.

"My father was involved in what happened to your family," Adrian said, before I could ask. Plainly. Like it cost him nothing, though I could see, in the way his jaw worked afterward, that it cost him everything. "I don't know the whole story. But I know something, and I was trying to find proof before I told you, because an accusation isn't enough to bring down an Alpha Council."

"You keep saying you're protecting me. All you've done is hide things."

"You're right." He said it like an apology and a confession both, his voice dropping low enough that it felt almost private, even surrounded by that many people. "But there's something you need to understand. I never hated you. When I saw you tonight, I wanted to claim the bond the second our eyes met. I didn't, because the moment I accepted you, the Council would have known the girl they spent eighteen years hiding had finally been found."

"Found," I repeated. The word made no sense yet. It would, soon enough, and I would wish it hadn't.

A horn cut him off before he could explain - the eastern gate under attack, dozens of rogues, more pouring through the trees. Adrian became someone else in front of me, all command, sealing roads and ordering shelters open with a voice that moved a hundred warriors at once, the fear from a moment ago folded away somewhere I couldn't see. Whatever he was, whatever his family had done, there was no doubting that when he spoke, the pack obeyed without hesitation.

Then the pendant under my collar went warm, warm enough that I pressed a hand flat against my chest to feel it through the fabric.

A whisper slid into my mind, not quite words, more like a memory of a voice I'd never actually heard. *Come to me.*

"Did you hear that?" I asked.

"Hear what?"

I looked toward the western forest, where nothing stood, and the whisper came again, clearer this time, threading itself through my thoughts like it had always been there and I was only now learning to listen for it. *Come to the temple.*

"I have to go somewhere," I said.

"Where?"

"The old Moon Temple."

His face changed instantly, the command in his voice replaced by something closer to alarm. "No. That temple has been sealed for eighteen years."

"Then why is it calling me?"

"It spoke to you?" All the color left his face. "Elena, you are not going there alone."

"Then come with me."

"I can't - the eastern gate-"

"Then I will."

He looked at me for a long moment, something breaking and rebuilding behind his eyes, and finally nodded, slow and reluctant. "Stay on the western path. Don't go inside."

"You just told me to go there."

"I know. Apparently I'm terrible at keeping you out of trouble." A faint, exhausted smile, gone almost as soon as it appeared. Another explosion rocked the village behind us, close enough that I felt it in the soles of my feet. "I have to go."

"Adrian." He stopped mid-turn. I hadn't planned to say anything else, but it came out anyway, small and unguarded. "Come back."

For one second the most feared Alpha in the Northern Territories looked like a boy who badly wanted someone to have said that to him before. "I will."

---

The old Moon Temple stood beyond a line of trees so still that even the wind seemed to avoid it, the silence pressing down thick enough to feel against my skin. Dust drifted through broken moonlight as I stepped inside, my footsteps echoing off stone that hadn't heard a voice in eighteen years, following the heat of the pendant to a circular symbol carved into the floor - a crescent moon, three stars, the same mark from my pocket, worn smooth by feet that had stood there long before mine.

I stepped onto it. Nothing happened.

"Maybe I'm losing my mind," I said, and the floor answered by cracking open beneath me.

A staircase rose out of the stone with a groan like something waking after a very long sleep, cold air pouring up from the dark below, carrying with it a smell I couldn't name - old parchment, maybe, or something older than that. Something down there was calling, not with words this time but with something closer to memory - the way a smell can put you back in a room you haven't stood in for years without your permission.

At the bottom, a stone table held a small wooden box, its hinges rusted nearly shut, and inside it, a single letter in my mother's handwriting, the ink faded to brown at the edges.

*If you're reading this, they failed to erase you.*

Beneath it, a second line, written smaller, like an afterthought she hadn't been able to leave out: *But don't trust the man you were destined to love.*

I stopped breathing. It couldn't be about Adrian. It couldn't be.

Footsteps sounded above - someone had entered the temple. "Elena?" Adrian's voice, closer than I expected, urgent in a way that almost pulled me straight up the stairs toward him. Relief nearly did it before a second voice answered him.

"She isn't here."

Seraphina.

I pressed myself against the cold stone and listened, my heart loud enough in my own ears that I was certain they'd hear it too.

"You shouldn't have followed her," Adrian said.

"You shouldn't have lied to the Council."

"I had to."

"You're risking everything for her."

A long silence. Then: "You know what happens if she remembers."

My fingers tightened on the letter until the old paper creased under my grip. *Remembers what?*

"She won't remember until she's ready," Adrian said.

"And if she remembers before then?"

Another silence, longer.

"Then we may lose her forever."

Footsteps started down the staircase. I looked around - nowhere to hide, the chamber offering nothing but bare stone - until the wall behind me began to glow, warm gold light seeping through a seam I hadn't noticed, and a hidden doorway opened just in time to swallow me whole.

On the other side stood a massive mirror that wasn't reflecting me at all. It showed a little girl, six years old, standing beside a woman who looked exactly like my mother - and beside them, a much younger Adrian, no older than seven, his dark hair falling into eyes that hadn't yet learned to be cold.

I had never met him as a child. At least, I had always believed that.

My mother's hand settled on the boy's shoulder in the vision. *Protect her,* she said.

*I promise,* he answered, with the kind of solemnity only children manage to make sound completely real.

The image shifted - my mother crying, a man behind her wearing the Blackthorne crest, his hand not gentle on her shoulder - and then the mirror went dark, and a voice I didn't recognize whispered from somewhere behind the glass.

"Ask Adrian why he remembers you," it said, as the mirror split down the middle with a sound like ice giving way, "when you don't remember him."