POV Kiara
"Leave," I hissed at Aleron, my voice carrying both Alpha command and barely contained panic. "Leave now or my werewolves will tear you apart."
His expression shifted to something that might have been understanding, his pale eyes taking in my rigid posture and the way I kept glancing toward the approaching sounds.
"Ah," he said with that infuriating calm, "the impossible position reveals itself."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded, though my enhanced hearing was already picking up Thomen's voice calling my name from somewhere deeper in the forest.
"Caught between species," Aleron mused, stepping closer with predatory grace. "Between loyalties that no longer align, between truths you can't yet reveal to the people who love you most."
"I'm not caught between anything," I snapped, but the lie tasted bitter on my tongue. "I know exactly who I am and where I belong."
"Really?" Aleron's smile was sharp as broken glass. "When you go back to your wolf mate tonight, will you mention our little conversation then? Will you share the truth about your vampire mother? About the soulmate bond between us, or about the way you’re still leaning to my touch?"
"Shut the fuck up," I snarled, but we both knew the answer.
"It would be unfair if I told you everything at once," Aleron continued, his voice carrying the weight of decades of careful planning. "Information is power, after all, and power shared too quickly can be... destructive."
The howls were getting closer now, and I could distinguish not just voices but individual heartbeats, scents. Even the particular way each pack member moved through the underbrush.
The sensory overload should have been overwhelming, but instead it felt natural, as if I'd always possessed this level of awareness and was only now acknowledging it.
"Soon you won't be able to hide what you are," Aleron said, watching my face as the realization of my enhanced abilities dawned. "The changes are accelerating, aren't they? Soon your precious pack will notice that their Alpha can move with speed that rivals vampires."
"I told you to fucking shut up and leave," I demanded, though part of me desperately wanted more answers to the questions burning in my mind. "I don't want to hear any more of your manipulative bullshit."
"Don't you?" Aleron stepped even closer, his eyes reflecting years of patient waiting. "Then why haven't you attacked me properly? Why are you standing here listening instead of ripping my throat out for killing your father?"
I couldn't answer it. I should have been trying to kill him more determined, should have been using every enhanced ability to end the monster who'd destroyed my family.
Instead, I was hanging on his every word, desperate for understanding even as I hated him for providing it.
"I'll give you time to turn on your brain and think," he said, his voice dropping to something dangerously intimate. "But you will need me, Kiara. The vampire soulmate bond ensures I'll feel every tremor of your distress. And when the pain becomes unbearable... I'll come for you myself."
His words carried both tempting promise and implicit threat, and I realized with growing horror that he was right. There had been moments over the past few days when I'd felt... observed.
As if someone was sharing my emotional state from a distance.
"When you're ready for more answers," Aleron continued, "when the lies become too heavy to carry and the truth becomes too strong to ignore, I'll be waiting. I'll always be waiting."
"Kiara!" Thomen's voice rang through the trees, much closer now.
The sound of my mate calling my name sent another spike of panic through me.
How could I face him knowing what I now knew? How could I look into his trusting warm, loving eyes and pretend everything is normal?
Aleron's expression showed he was reading every emotion on my face.
"Such a difficult position, indeed," he murmured with mock sympathy.
"Alpha Kiara!" Max's voice joined the search, along with Mikaela's higher tones calling my name.
As Thomen's voice called out again, getting dangerously close to our location, Aleron melted back into the shadows with speed that made me struggle to track him.
One moment he was there, solid and threatening, and the next he was gone as if he'd never existed.
I quickly composed myself, forcing my features into the mask of strength my pack expected from their Alpha. By the time Thomen burst through the treeline moments later, I was crouched by a fallen log, apparently examining tracks on the forest floor as if following a trail.
"Kiara!" Relief flooded Thomen's voice as he spotted me. "Thank Goddess. We heard—there was fighting, and then you weren't responding to the pack link."
"I'm fine," I said, standing and brushing dirt from my knees while trying to appear calm. "I caught a vampire scent and followed it, but the trail went cold about a quarter mile back."
"Any sign of vampire presence?" Thomen asked, moving closer with that familiar mix of concern and protective instinct that usually comforted me.
"Nothing recent," I lied, hating how easily the deception came. "But we should increase patrols on the eastern border. Something feels... different."
As Thomen reached out to take my hand, his touch warm and familiar and completely innocent of the supernatural changes consuming me, I realized that Aleron had been right about one thing.
Soon, I wouldn't be able to hide what I was becoming.