Page 42 of Alpha’s Wife

It won’t be light for another couple of hours, so I get up and head for her room. The door is pulled shut, but the latch isn’t on, and I listen to the sound of her breathing. She’s asleep. Moving with all the stealth my wolf provides, I move around the side of the bed, acutely aware of how sexy she looks with the covers thrown back, her legs exposed, and her hair a riot around her on the pillow. She’s lying on her side, and it takes everything in me not to slide in next to her and pull her into my arms. But then I see the tablet sticking out from under the pillow and remember why I’m here.

I take the tablet, and she stays asleep; her breathing doesn’t change, and I stand there just looking at her for a minute, hoping I’m wrong.

Taking it through to the kitchen, I sit at the island and fire it up. There’s a message waiting from her coven, the address I set up for her to write to the old women who raised her. I hover over it. Part of me wants to just go back to bed, think about the pack, the war, a million other things than whatever she’s talking to an old woman about.

But I don’t; I open it because I don’t trust easily and I suddenly feel like I should.

It isn’t from the old woman.

Selene, it’s starting. We’ve talked to our mates.

I read it once. Then I read it again, slower. Taking it all in and making sure I don’t miss anything.

It’s all there. The harbors. The council meetings. My half-brothers’ names dropped with such familiarity, as though she’s been saying them for weeks. Tell them the full story of their brothers. Stop it on that end. Our mates. Ours. Like she’s one of them. Like she’s been working against me the entire time she’s lying in my bed.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. She wanted to escape; of course, she did. Maybe nothing really changed for her.

I scroll back because I need to know how deep it runs, how long it’s been going on for, and how compromised my plans are. And it’s all there, weeks of it. Messages in, messages out, and only a handful from her actual coven, mainly warning her to be careful as she betrays my pack.

There’s one sent the morning after the ambush. The night I came home half torn open, and she patched me up so tenderly before giving me her body and her magic. She wrote to the island the next day, while I was stupid enough to think the fact that she gave the bond magic so willingly meant something.

Which begs the question, why did she?

There are more from days after I told her about my mother, feeding information back across the water to the sons of the man who might as well have put my mother in the ground himself.

There’s one where she tries to convince them I’m a good man. Those exact words. He’s a good man underneath all of it, she tells Emily, if you’d only let yourselves see it. She’s been defending me to the three men I’ve sworn to bring down. Giving away my secrets, talking about me behind my back.

Emily tells her to delete the messages, but she didn’t delete all the folders, so I scour them for more information. I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that I’ve had a witch trying to break through the wards on the island, and here she is spilling everything to one of my half-brother’s witch mates.

She’s completely stolen the edge I’ve spent years building and handed it to them. Every day I sit still now is one more day they get more ready for what’s coming.

Fine. Then I won’t sit still anymore. She’s done this.

I set the tablet down on the counter. Carefully, because if I don’t, I’m going to put it straight through the window. My chest feels tight, and there’s a roar building in my ears like a storm. I brace both hands on the counter and wait for the cold to come, the flat, clear calm that takes over in a crisis and has kept me alive this long.

It doesn’t come. For once, it doesn’t come, because this isn’t a raid or a fight. This is her, and my wolf still wants her; he still claims his mate.

I stand there in the murky gray before dawn, and I try to temper my rage, because I’ve never hated someone in a moment and wanted to keep them safe, too. Even if that means protecting them from myself.

I don’t remember crossing the house. I’m just suddenly in the bedroom doorway with the tablet back in my hand and my wolf so close under my skin I can feel my own teeth aching with the urge to shift.

“Selene,” I say, my voice tight.

She’s awake before I finish speaking, and she sits up, sees the tablet in my hand, and I watch the color drain clean out of her face. That’s my answer, right there.

“Ronan…” she replies, pulling the sheets up.

“Don’t,” I reply, and it doesn’t even sound like my voice. “Don’t you dare tell me it isn’t what it looks like.”

“It isn’t…” She stops, because it is, and we both know it is. “Please. Just let me explain.”

I throw the tablet onto the bed between us. “Explain, then.”

She doesn’t touch it. She looks at it, then back at me, and her chin comes up the way it does when she’s decided to stand her ground, and even now, a part of me wants to cross the room and hold her, and I hate that more than I’ve ever hated anything.

“I was just trying to stop the war,” she says.

“By handing me to my half-brothers,” I snap.