"I may be your second chance, Wade, but I will not be your second choice."
Reeling from the death of his mate, Alpha Wade tried everything in his power to bring her back to life. So consumed with raising her from the dead, he almost missed his secon...
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SITTING next to Alpha Wade made me realize how much of a stranger my mate was.
Werewolves were not known to take their time where the mate bond was concerned. On the contrary, most mated couples marked and mated each other before the first week of their acquaintance had come and gone. Of some select couples, a significant portion was already welcoming the idea of starting a family before their marks had time to heal.
My mate, on the other hand, would be content never laying another eye on me again.
But he had proposed a truce. A truce to set our differences aside.
I wasn't sure how much I trusted him to hold up his side of the bargain. He was an Alpha, after all. An Alpha who was not shy about flaunting his title if it furthered his argument.
At the end of the day, he was my Alpha first and foremost. If he decided—for whatever reason—to not uphold the truce, to crush my dreams of being on Patrol, I didn't think I would have much say in the matter.
It was simply just a consequence of our Werewolf hierarchy.
Of course, if this became a pattern for Alpha Wade, there was no saying how long members of Bluestrike would stay loyal to him. Their bond and connection to him was already weathered since he had been absent from the pack most of his life. The legacy of his father, former Alpha Thames, is what kept their spirits up.
"You okay?" Alpha Wade broke the silence between us.
After almost an hour of back and forth, we agreed to the truce. And after even more time, I had gathered enough courage to seat myself in Alpha Wade's fancy SUV.
His car was nothing less than I would have expected from an Alpha. It was big, black, and bulky. It took up more space than necessary, and the engine revved loudly. The seats were made of leather, and the interior was immaculate. A car fit for an Alpha.
My hands gripped the sides of the passenger's seat, my knuckles white. The palms of my hands sweated against the leather, causing a subtle squeak to fill the car every so often. My gaze locked forward, staring at an immovable mound of bug guts plastered on the windshield. By now, my eyes had glossed over, too preoccupied with steadying my breaths.
I took my time responding to Alpha Wade, my voice shaky as I said, "Yeah. I just haven't been in a car in years."
"Years?"
"Yeah, you can basically walk everywhere in the mountains, especially when in wolf form," I reasoned, gripping the seat with more intensity. My response was not so much a lie, but it hadn't been the whole truth.
I hadn't been paralyzed with fear to enter a car because of my infrequent travel in one. I had been stunned to the core because one of the worst tragedies of my life took place in a car, and I had never had the intention of stepping foot in one again. Much less did I ever think I would be traveling in a car for hours on end.
