The Alpha Mate

Chapter 88

[POV: Evan]

"He's going to be Draven's mate," Dominic said, tossing the words at me like a dagger he knew would hit its mark.

I froze halfway through the corridor, back turned to him, fists clenched at my sides. The stone walls of the estate seemed to press inward, the air thickening around me until I could feel it against my skin like something physical.

"What did you just say?" I asked without turning around.

His boots clicked on the stone floor as he approached—calm, poised, venomous.

"Atlas," he purred. "Your sweet little martyr. He's been officially announced as the Alpha's chosen mate. Draven declared it publicly at the Rebirth Feast. In front of the entire pack."

I turned then.

Dominic's eyes glowed with amusement, his smile sharp enough to cut glass. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, every line of his body arranged in a posture of casual superiority—the posture of a man who fed on other people's pain and never bothered to hide it.

"Poor Evan. All that brooding, all your secret little visits to the border. All that pining." His voice dropped, silky and cruel. "And for what? For him to spread himself open for a savage Alpha who doesn't even know what he's worth?"

"Stop," I growled, but my voice came out more hollow than threatening. The word scraped against the inside of my throat like sandpaper.

He stepped closer, the air around him heavy with cedarwood and something darker beneath it—something that smelled like ambition left to rot.

"You should have listened to me when you had the chance," he said. "You could have stayed loyal. You did stay loyal—for years. And now you're sulking because my pathetic twin brother finally found someone who sees him as more than a damaged thing to pity."

"I said stop," I snapped, louder this time, the muscles in my neck cording tight. But still he didn't flinch.

Dominic tilted his head, mock sympathy dripping from every angle of his expression. "Is it hard, Evan? Knowing he never really wanted you? That the only thing you were ever good for was being a stepping stone on his way to someone better?"

My jaw clenched so hard I felt the enamel grind.

I couldn't breathe. Not here, not with him.

I stormed past without another word, shoulder clipping his as I shoved open the heavy doors of the estate and stepped into the forest beyond the property.

The cool night air hit me like a slap—sharp, pine-scented, carrying the distant howl of a patrol wolf somewhere on the ridge. But it didn't help. Nothing helped.

I ran. Not in wolf form—just ran, boots pounding against soil and moss, branches tearing at the bare skin of my forearms as if the forest itself wanted a piece of me.

My lungs burned, my calves screamed, but I didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling meant drowning in the one truth I'd been running from since the moment Atlas had pulled his hand from mine and told me he'd found something more.

Every step echoed with a name I didn't want to hear.

Atlas.

Atlas in someone else's arms. Atlas beneath someone else's hands. Atlas whispering someone else's name in the dark, his silver-white hair spread across a pillow that wasn't mine, his body arching into a touch that belonged to another man.

And I—left behind. Again.

He was supposed to be mine.

We were bound by something I'd believed was real. I'd known his soul long before I'd known his body. I'd watched him grow, seen his pain, held his hand through nights so dark neither of us thought the morning would come.

I'd loved him even when I didn't know how to show it—even when Dominic's manipulation had twisted my silence into something that looked like betrayal.

And he chose Draven. He gave him everything.

My breath burned in my lungs as I dropped to my knees beneath a twisted pine, fingers digging into the cold dirt until my nails packed with soil. The muscles in my thighs quivered from the sprint, and sweat ran in cold tracks down the back of my neck, soaking into the collar of my shirt.

"He was mine," I muttered into the dark.

Mine.

He was never meant to be someone else's. And that was when I felt him—the presence that lived inside me, dark, coiled, always waiting. Rau.

His voice slithered through the corners of my mind like smoke. Cold and cruel. Patient in the way only something truly dangerous could be.

"You sound pathetic."

I squeezed my eyes shut. "Go away."

"He was never yours," Rau said, each word landing like a boot on bruised ribs. "You were weak. Soft. And he wanted a man—not a sniveling pup who watched from the shadows and called it protection."

"He cared about me," I said through gritted teeth. My hands were shaking, the tendons in my forearms standing taut beneath the skin.

"He pitied you."

My hands curled tighter. "No."

"He looked at you and saw someone he could escape through. Someone safe. Predictable. Forgettable."

"Stop."

"And now?" Rau laughed—a sound like gravel dragged across bone. "Now he's wrapped around Draven while you whimper in the woods like a dog that lost its bone."

A snarl broke from my throat, raw and animal, tearing through the quiet of the forest. A bird startled from a nearby branch, wings beating hard against the dark.

"Let me in," Rau whispered, his voice shifting—softer now, almost seductive, the way a flame looks warm before it burns. "Let me show you what it means to take back what's yours. Let me burn that weakness out of you. We'll make them bleed. Him. Draven. All of them."

"No."

"You're already cracking, Evan. Let me finish it."

I could feel him—pacing behind the wall in my mind, claws clicking against stone, his presence pressing outward like something swelling against a dam.

The bloodlust curled beneath my skin like smoke filling a sealed room, hot and suffocating and impossible to ignore.

I wanted to fight him. I always fought him.

But Goddess, I was so tired. So angry and broken.

What if he was right?

What if everything I'd believed about myself—about Atlas—was just another lie I'd told to keep from drowning? A story I'd written where I was the noble one, the one who sacrificed, the one who loved quietly and purely from afar.

What if the truth was uglier than that? What if the distance I'd kept hadn't been protection at all—just cowardice dressed in better clothes?

What if I wasn't the good one? What if I was just too afraid to become the monster I'd always carried inside me?

"You're not a monster," I whispered to myself, fingers still buried in the dirt, knees grinding into stone and root.

But Rau laughed again—low, knowing, certain.

"Aren't I you?"